Catherine Ryan Howard

An Irish crime writer who worked at Disney World and then in a Cork hotel while trying to get published, and self-published a memoir about it before the novels sold.

Distress Signals sets a disappearance on a cruise ship, where jurisdiction belongs to nobody. 56 Days does something harder: two people meet just before Ireland locks down in 2020, move in together far too early, and the timeline cuts between before and after a body is found. Using the pandemic that soon could have been cheap and was not.