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In Venice, 1756, the city is at the height of its prodigious power. But as the madness of Carnival descends, a dark force stalks the gothic shadows. The body of one of Venice’s brightest actors has been discovered: crucified, lines of verse carved into his chest. And it is not an isolated killing. For the murderer, known only as Chimera, is determined to people the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno with the traitorous, the depraved, and the gluttonous. Only by releasing the Black Orchid—childhood friend of Casanova, rake, gambler, lover, spy, and soon-to-be detective—a man condemned to death for adultery, can the doge of Venice hope to put an end to the grotesque killings. The Black Orchid soon finds himself ensnared in a terrible game of cat and mouse. As the streets of Venice fill with masked Carnivalgoers, and as the Orchid’s old enemies—and old lovers—return to haunt him, he is drawn further into the Inferno, to the heart of a secret sect and a plot to bring about the downfall of Venice.

Barry Cummins examines the cases of Ireland’s women and children who have vanished in sinister and mysterious circumstances. Missing looks at who may be responsible for these disappearances.

This book outlines, in clear and disturbing detail, the fact that some of Ireland’s most cold and calculating killers have not been caught.

They are some of Ireland’s most famous names, for all the wrong reasons. They are Ireland’s missing women, many of them murdered and their bodies hidden by evil killers who remain at large. They include American woman Annie McCarrick who was murdered in the Dublin-Wicklow mountains; Jo Jo Dullard who was abducted and murdered while hitching a lift in County Kildare; and former model Fiona Pender who was seven months pregnant when she and her unborn child were murdered and hidden at an unknown location in the midlands.

And then there are Ireland’s two long-term missing children. What ever happened to little Mary Boyle, the seven-year old County Donegal girl last seen walking near her grandparents home over a quarter of a century ago? And where is Philip Cairns, who was only thirteen years old when he was abducted from a Dublin roadside while walking to school in 1986?