A Thread of Violence

In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly withoutmoney. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. Inthe process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrestin the apartment of Ireland's Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remainsone of the most shocking in Ireland's history and the words used to describe the crimes (grotesque,unprecedented, bizarre, and almost unbelievable) have remained in the cultural lexicon as theacronym GUBU.

Mark O'Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent yearsthis haunting has become mutual. When O'Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surroundingthese horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man livingout his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk.

As the two men circle one another, O'Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his ownnarrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?