Kavanagh devotes special attention to Parnell, for good reason, because he is so important to this story and so beguiling. It’s refreshing to encounter an author willing to take the time to render political personalities in such fine detail.

The author Julie Kavanagh has stepped away from the more familiar ground in this skilful, multi-faceted historical narrative.

... tragic events are vividly recounted.

What Julie Kavanagh has done here is to bring this most extraordinary of assassinations to life.

Julie Kavanagh...does a masterful job of sorting through the complexities and making the history accessible and comprehensible.

Kavanagh has done an adroit unpicking of the intricacies of the history, and her book is at once admirable for its scholarship and immensely enjoyable in its raciness. Yet at the close one is left with the inevitable question: All that violence, all those deaths, and for what?.

... marvelously engaging.

Kavanagh has constructed a riveting tale that is both deeply researched and unforgettable. The sensational events leading up to and following the trials and executions of those directly involved in the assassinations sharply brought into focus a long history of bloodshed, oppression, and injustice that also touched many of the Victorian era’s political notables, including Queen Victoria, prime minister William Gladstone, and Irish nationalist Charles Parnell. As the book’s action shifts from Ireland to England, then to North America and South Africa, it skillfully tells a complex story of ambition, conspiracy, betrayal, and coercion that was centuries in the making, with implications that reach to the 21st century.

... riveting.

... a page-turning history.

... painstaking and sometimes-harrowing detail.