As the Garda advances the Veronica Guerin murder case, the first book about her will be out in early March. Emily O'Reilly's Veronica Guerin, The Life And Death Of A Crime Reporter was due from publishers Vintage, a branch of Random House, at the beginning of February, but has been delayed by a lawyer's report on possible libel. The brother of the late Veronica Guerin, Jimmy Guerin, co-operated with the author, but her husband Graham Turley and employers the Sunday Independent have not.
"It is about the Sunday Indo and Veronica Guerin, and the nature of her work for them and why this woman died working," says the author. It does not examine the activities of the criminals who killed her, an area where much more remains to be revealed. O'Reilly says she set out to write one book, but found herself writing another. "I discovered she was an immensely complex personality with an immensely complex psychology that few people, not even her closest friends, knew about or understood."