Murder on Lough Derg Launch Night at Hodges Figgis – A Night on the Water
Mercier Press | May 2026
There is something fitting about launching a novel set on the Shannon in high summer on a sunny May evening in a Dublin bookshop. Last Monday, Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street filled up with readers, friends, family, and a few people who had ‘paid extortionate fees to teenage babysitters’ to be there – and every one of them left the better for it.
Murder on Lough Derg, the debut novel from Cormac Quinn, published by Mercier Press, arrived in the world to an audience who had clearly been waiting for it. The champagne flowed – a natural fit for a book centred on the social rituals of a lakeside yacht club in the blazing summer of 2018 – and the atmosphere was warm and chatty, with attendees genuinely moved by the time the evening wound to a close.
The book, in brief
Introduced by author Richy Craven, Murder on Lough Derg follows Jack Myers, a journalist who has spent twenty years covering conflict zones across the globe and suddenly finds himself ‘somewhere far more treacherous: a yacht club on Lough Derg’. A suspicious death turns his holiday into a murder investigation, with secrets buried for over a decade beginning to surface. Craven set the scene perfectly, describing the novel as ‘a uniquely Irish whodunnit written with a clear love of the genre, with a truly vivid sense of both place and time.’ He added that the highest compliment he could pay it as a mystery was that he was ‘absolutely certain several times that I knew what was going to happen, and then changed my mind immediately a chapter later.’
He finished to a laugh by admitting he’d read it in a day, and asking Cormac when the next one was coming out.
The story behind the story
When Cormac took the floor, he told the room something that every debut novelist’s crowd wants to hear – the unlikely, slightly chaotic, deeply human story of how the book actually got written. It began, he said, in Madrid in the summer of 2023, between jobs, with a one-year-old in a park, long lunches on the balcony, and a conscious decision to play the role of the struggling writer. The only problem, as he put it, was ‘without the actual writing part.’
The writing came anyway. Early mornings, stolen hours, a discipline that built quietly and then took over entirely. By the time he returned to Ireland, the first draft was ninety per cent done – and, as he told the room, the difficulty had never been tuning into the book. It was tuning out. ‘Whether it be commuting to work, standing in a supermarket in the middle of a conversation, my mind would just be drifting back to the book and what the next chapter would be.’ He confessed to losing himself in committee-level deliberations about whether the Yacht Club would have approved fairy lights at the midsummer ball, and what the budget would have been. The room, recognising something true in this, laughed with real warmth.
Mercier Press received the manuscript in late 2024. Cormac’s account of that moment was delivered deadpan and landed perfectly: ‘Mercier Press got back to me with an email with a simple one-line: we want to publish your book. Which, if you know Dee and her email style, was unnecessarily wordy for her emails. Because Dee is a fan of the one-word response. “Are you coming to the book launch?” “Yeah.” “Are you staying the night?” “No.”‘ The room at Hodges Figgis enjoyed this considerably.
Where the book comes from
Cormac read a passage from the novel – Jack Myers’s first evening at the Yacht Club, a masterclass in social discomfort and sharp comic observation, culminating in an encounter with the formidable Commodore Richardson that left the room in absolutely no doubt this was a book worth getting stuck into.
He spoke about the summer of 2018 – still the hottest and driest on record in Ireland – and what it was like to return to the Shannon for the first time since his teenage years. ‘Ireland felt unfamiliar,’ he said. ‘I could almost have described the Shannon as exotic for a period.’ His wife, Caroline, had apparently read a draft and told him it read less like Lough Derg and more like Lake Como. He did not, he said, take this as the criticism she intended.
The book is dedicated to the memory of his father – a man who, as Cormac described him, had the boat as his first and favourite child, and who declared every May that this could be one of the great summers. The tribute was the most quietly moving moment of the evening. ‘He doesn’t appear in the book, but he’s influenced pretty much all of it in my head,’ Cormac said. He closed with a line he’d read online and which, he said, had stayed with him: ‘the best moments of a life are squeezed into a head full of thoughts and a handful of summers.’
When he finished, at least one person in the room was, as someone nearby noted, definitely not crying.
A night to remember
After-party drinks beckoned at 37 Dawson Street, but first – Cormac signed copies, the champagne continued, and the Hodges Figgis shelves did what shelves at a great book launch are supposed to do, launch Murder on Lough Derg into the Bestseller Charts with more books on order this week. Congratulations, Cormac!
Cormac closed the events with the remarks about his new cosy mystery;
A book about a summer, launched in summer, and meant to be read in the summer — a true summer read.
Murder on Lough Derg: A Jack Myers Mystery
Quinn, Cormac
When his instinct for uncovering the truth follows him on home turf, Jack Myers finds himself drawn into the hidden tensions of a close-knit Irish community where old secrets run deep, and no one welcomes an outsider asking questions.
ISBN: 9781917453578
Buy Now
Murder on Lough Derg by Cormac Quinn is published by Mercier Press and available now in all good bookshops and online.