A Thread Of Violence A Story Of Truth Invention And Murder Mark Oconnell by Mark O'connell b4af83c4-8787-4883-ba6e-59198424ecff, B4AF83C4-8787-4883-BA6E-59198424ECFF instant download after payment.

Irish journalist Mark O'Connell's A Thread of Violence is an engrossing & intimate glimpse into the psyche of an actual yet improbable murderer.

Over the course of a few weeks in the summer of 1982, 37-year-old Malcolm Macarthur, debonair heir to a large country estate in County Meath, savagely bludgeoned to death Dublin nurse Bridie Gargan, in the act of stealing her car; killed Donal Dunne with a shotgun he ostensibly intended to purchase from the young farmer; & botched an armed robbery from a onetime acquaintance. Macarthur's one-man crime wave was part of his desperate plan to right his sinking financial ship, after he had squandered his share of the proceeds from the sale of his family's rural homestead.

O'Connell (Notes from an Apocalypse) had been fascinated with Macarthur's bizarre story ever since he learned, as a child, that the killer had been apprehended in an apartment in the same suburban Dublin complex where his grandparents lived. After a handful of chance encounters on the streets of Dublin--where Macarthur lived openly, following his release from prison in 2012--O'Connell decided he wanted to write about a man he admits "compelled me like a haunting." For roughly a year, he engaged someone he came to think of as a "character from a novel manifested in the physical world" in wide-ranging conversations.

O'Connell is a patient, thorough interlocutor, especially in conversations where his predominant feeling was frustration with Macarthur's rationalizations & evasions. The insights O'Connell offers into his own emotions are also revealing, producing a case study about the chilling ease with which one man can be driven to murder.  --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer