There's little that I miss about Irish cooking. One notable exception is Brown Bread aka Brown Soda Bread. I don't know of any bakery that makes it in the States, though I've found it at a couple of Irish pubs. The main difficulty in making it is finding the coarse-ground wholemeal flour. The usual fine-ground stuff has the wrong texture.

I know of only one place in the Seattle area that carries the right flour and that's The Grainery, 13629 1st Ave S, Burien, WA 98168; (206) 244-5015. I bought some flour there today, made a loaf, and brought the loaf and a 10lb bag of flour to an Irish friend's birthday …continue.

A sequel to Dead I Well May Be.

June 16, 2004: the Bloomsday centenary. Michael Forsythe's arch­neme­sis Bridget Callaghan needs him. Her eleven-year-old daughter has gone missing in Belfast, and Forsythe may be only one who can find her.

In the course of one very long day that loosely re­ca­pit­u­lates the events of Joyce's Ulysses, Forsythe cuts a bloody swathe through the criminal underworld of Belfast.

Gripping, if over the top.

Roddy Doyle has visited Paula Spencer twice before. First in The Family, a BBC TV serial; then in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Ten years on from the last book, Paula is a recovering alcoholic who only recently crawled out of the bottle. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger have passed her by: Paula continues to clean Dublin offices and houses for a living. Her youngest two children are still at home. Jack is fine but Leanne is heading towards alcoholism herself. Her other son, John Paul, is estranged and …continue.

Michael Forsythe is an illegal immigrant from Northern Ireland, working for a crime boss in Harlem in 1992. When he sleeps with his boss's girlfriend, he and three others are set up to take the fall for a drug bust in Mexico. He breaks out of a hellhole prison, losing a foot and his friends along the way, and makes his way back to New York to exact revenge.

McKinty writes lush, at­mos­pher­ic prose, with a good turn in dialog. Forsythe grows from a bright, feckless teenager, with a …continue.

Sequel to The Wrong Kind of Blood, in which private eye Ed Loy returned to his native Dublin after 20 years in Los Angeles.

Loy is asked to find Emily, a teenager from the pres­ti­gious Howard family, after porno­graph­ic photos of her are sent to her father. He locates her easily, but not before he finds a body, the first of several murders that will rip the Howards apart, unearthing long-buried secrets.

Loy is a hard-boiled private eye, somewhat in the Marlowe vein: "a man of honor, by instinct, …continue.

A gritty noir set in the western Irish city of Galway. Jack Taylor used to be in the guards (police) as a young man, but nowadays he's usually found at the bottom of a bottle. He makes a little money by finding things. One day, a distraught mother asks him to prove that her teenaged daughter did not commit suicide. He is reluctant to take the case, fearing (rightly) that it will require too much of him. Jack struggles mightily with his alcoholism, and both the case and his drinking …continue.

In last week's newsletter from the Irish Heritage Club, I read about a survey of Irish-born residents of Washington state.

SEATTLE-NEWS@IRISHCLUB.ORG, FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2007, PART-1

IRISH SURVEY - Irish-born residents of Washington State are being asked to complete a 32-question survey in connection with a PhD. research project sponsored by Seattle's Irish Im­mi­gra­tion Support Group. The goal is to take a snapshot of Irish-born people living in the Seattle area who left Ireland in the 1900s, mostly those who left Ireland after WW-II. If you or someone you know is willing to par­tic­i­pate, please contact Melissa at 206-229-8512 or melissae@irishclub.org.

I filled it out and emailed it back to …continue.

This is the second mystery featuring Nora Gavin, an American forensic pathol­o­gist living in Ireland. The body of a ritually murdered Iron Age man is found preserved in a bog, and Gavin is called in to examine the body. Shortly thereafter, another similarly murdered body is found in the bog, but this one is wearing a wristwatch.

Hart writes lean, clear prose, with believable characters, and a not-completely improbable plot. Her Irish characters sound and act like Irish people, rather than refugees from a Lucky Charms outtake.

My main …continue.

Ed Loy has returned to Dublin after 20 years in Los Angeles to bury his mother. An old friend asks him to find her missing husband. This sends him into a viper's nest of corruption among property developers and upwardly mobile gangsters, as he confronts the demons of his past.

Loy, after his long, self-imposed exile, finds a very different Dublin to the one that he left. The economic miracle known as the Celtic Tiger has wrought huge changes over the last 15 years, cat­a­pult­ing Ireland from a country that …continue.