This is a gruesome book. It is the story of murders most foul – of infants and of the elderly – and of those who committed them and were saved from the gallows. Colm Wallace, who is a national-school teacher in Galway, softens his accounts somewhat by giving the socioeconomic backgrounds to the killings. We also learn about Albert Pierrepoint, the English hangman, who said that he loved hanging Irishmen, because “they always go quietly and without trouble”. The first murders in the book occurred just before and during the Civil War, when there was a legal and political vacuum. The best known and most gruesome is probably that of Shan Mohangi, the South African who killed poor Hazel Mullen in 1963, when he was 23 and she just 15. Her body was found in 17 pieces. Just as shocking is that he was convicted only of manslaughter and served just four years in prison.
