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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?

They kidnapped him in a small town In Brazil. He had changed his name and his appearance, but they were sure they had their man.

Four years before, he had been called Patrick S. Lanigan. He had died in a car crash in February 1992. His gravestone lay in a cemetery in Biloxi, Mississippi. He had been a partner at an up and coming law firm, had a pretty wife, a new daughter, and a bright future. Six weeks after his death, $90 million had disappeared from the law firm. It was then that his partners knew he was still alive.