MCM Investigations Books in Order

MCM Investigations shifts the spotlight onto Brigit Conroy and Paul Mulchrone, the unlikely partners who decide that if trouble keeps finding them, they might as well charge for dealing with it. Based in Dublin and spinning out of the main trilogy, the series follows their efforts to run a small private detective agency that never quite has enough money, staff or common sense.

The Final Game opens with the death of Dorothy Graham, an elderly woman with a formidable personality, a complicated history and a serious amount of money. Dorothy arranges one last piece of mischief from beyond the grave: a bizarre competition in which her unpleasant relatives and assorted hangers on must complete a set of increasingly strange tasks to inherit her fortune. Paul is forced into the contest, Brigit is dragged along with him and retired detective Jimmy Stewart is lured back into the job. Between deciphering Dorothy's rules and investigating what really happened to her, MCM Investigations end up in the middle of a family war.

Deccie Must Die brings the agency a very modern problem. Deccie Fadden, who once orbited their world as an annoying teenager, has reinvented himself as a lockdown shock-jock with a huge audience and an equally large pool of people who loathe him. When serious death threats start coming in, he turns to Brigit and Paul for protection. They find themselves juggling online mobs, real-world danger and the everyday grind of keeping the lights on after one accident leaves Paul less mobile than he would like.

Threaded through these cases are the things that make McDonnell's Dublin stories distinctive: banter that sounds like people talking in real pubs, tangled loyalties and a sense that every small victory comes at some cost. Family, both the kind you are born into and the kind you build for yourself, keeps complicating the work. Old faces from the Dublin Trilogy and McGarry Stateside regularly wander in, and the shadow of Bunny McGarry is never far away.

Future books, including The Big Steal, continue that pattern of standalone central mysteries woven into a larger ongoing story about the agency. You can dip into MCM Investigations without having read everything else, but readers who already know the wider cast will spot plenty of callbacks, in-jokes and emotional payoffs from earlier novels.