BOGMAIL

by Patrick McGinley

Ticknor & Fields; 259 pages; $9.95

Pub Owner Roarty tries to kill his philandering barman Eamonn Bales with a toadstool omelet. When the poison fails, the publican does in the cad with a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

So begins this loopy yarn, set in the misty, myth-ridden hills and bogs of County Donegal, northwest Ireland. Once his victim is buried deep in the peat, Roarty begins to receive demanding notes from "Bogmailer."The mystery meanders with Irish indirection to a surprising last-minute plot twist, employing a cast of tavern regulars that Flann O'Brien or Dylan Thomas would have stood to a round.

Cor Mogaill, Roary Rua, Gimp Gillespie, Old Crubog and the Englishman Potter down their Guinnesses under Roarty's suspicious eye and argue why earthworms are scarce and if a doe hare drops her kits all in one den. Roarty's bizarre attempts to unveil his blackmailer also reveal the tragicomedy of the Other Ireland. Locals fight the design of a new church--"a cube surmounted by a cone"--and investigate a blackguard who steals the priest's maid's knickers from the wash line. Without the precisely plotted mystery, this might merely be another scenic tour of Eire. But Bogmail is something more: "A novel with murder." McGinley has concocted a different brew in this fine first thriller. Good health to him, and many more of the same.

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