FYI - Interesting-sounding 2007 book - On the night of November 2, 1847, the Anglo-Irish landowner Major Denis Mahon was murdered by unknown assailants while driving a horse-drawn carriage on his property in County Roscommon, located in Ireland's lush inland section known as the Midlands. The killing, which has been linked over the years to both starving and disgruntled tenants and to a radical band of agrarian terrorists known as the Molly Maguires, is itself inextricably linked to one of history's greatest tragedies: the Irish potato famine and the deadly year known infamously throughout the world as Black '47. In The Killing of Major Denis Mahon, historian Peter Duffy excavates both the crime and the centuries of myth that have settled upon it, revealing the complex and fascinating ties between England's treatment of the Irish and the often unforgiving forces of the natural world, particularly the Phytophthora infestans water mold and its attacks on the Irish potato plant, the peasantry's primary food supply. The Mahon killing, Duffy writes, is significant because "its narrative contains the story of the Famine," from the failure of the staple food crop and the failures of government relief, to the brutal removal of tenants unable to pay their rents and the mounting anger against the landlord class deemed responsible for such misery and privation. Consider just one fact among the many that Duffy has marshaled: At the time of the November 1847 murder, Mahon's estate in Strokestown had dislodged 3,000 of its 12,000 poor and starving tenants, the very dispossessed Irish who were fleeing in desperation to America by the tens and then hundreds of thousands. "In conducting a full examination of the most celebrated death of the era," Duffy notes, "it is therefore necessary to tell the entire contentious tale of the Great Hunger itself." Drawing on his extensive research among both English and Irish archives, Duffy does precisely that, narrating the crime and its aftermath while drawing a detailed portrait of the Famine and its terrible effects on Anglo-Irish life and politics. An expertly written and richly engrossing study of imperialism, murder, and man-made disaster, The Killing of Major Denis Mahon places one of the 19th century's most explosive crimes in the context of the horrifying tragedy that did so much to create it.