The Penitent Murders

The Church moved him. The law forgot him. Someone remembered.When a defrocked priest is found dead in his Belfast flat, the scene is disturbing but the reaction is muted. Father Dermot Quinn abused seventeen children. Spent thirty years escaping justice. Lived on a Church pension until someone arranged him like a saint awaiting judgment—candles lit, rosary threaded through his fingers, psalm open at his head.DS Rose Gallagher knows murder when she sees it. And when a second priest appears—same staging, same history, same escape from accountability—she knows she's hunting someone with a list.The victims share one thing: St. Colman's Parish. A hub of abuse spanning four decades. Records missing. Families destroyed. Priests protected and shuffled until the scandal became too loud to hide.Someone has those records now. Someone who knows exactly which men the Church saved from prosecution. Someone with patience, devotion, and a wooden cane consecrated with blood.But when an innocent man appears among the guilty dead, Rose realizes the killer's justice isn't perfect. They're working from incomplete information. And the list isn't finished.The Penitent Murders: A Belfast crime thriller about delayed justice, institutional failure, and the dangerous line between vengeance and righteousness.