The Boy the Wolves Took

A confession closes the case. The money reopens it.

In a Cork winter that won’t stop raining, Dr Timothy Button is trying to build something steady with Mason Maloney—quick-witted, skittish, and always braced for the worst. Their flat isn’t a refuge so much as a holding space, where grief feels close enough to breathe and the past keeps leaning into the present.

Detective Bria Friday thinks Cassandra O’Neill’s death is finally boxed and filed—until it starts to slip. Arty Armitage has confessed to kidnapping Cassandra, but a high-value transfer authorised hours before she died doesn’t fit his timeline. Following the paper trail pulls Bria into the Exchange–Terminal scheme: a sealed economic-crime operation with London links, and a key witness now living under Garda guard.

When Bria drags Tim back in as an art consultant—and Mason’s name keeps surfacing in Cassandra’s orbit—the investigation tightens between Cork and Dublin. Digital footprints and missing devices turn ordinary details into pressure points, and the uneasy sense grows that somebody is trying to make the “right” story stick.

Tender, tense, bleakly funny, and morally thorny, The Boy the Wolves Took asks what people will do to protect the person they love—and what happens when that devotion is used against them.

Content notes: explicit on-page sex; frequent strong language; violence and threat.
Series note: A Memento Mori Novel. Continues directly from earlier books; the central case is conclusive.