Book ~ "Irish Eyes" (2000) Mary Kay Andrews (Kathy Hogan Trocheck)

From Goodreads ~ Callahan Garrity is the owner of House Mouse, a cleaning service that tidies up after Atlanta's elite. She's also a former cop and a part-time sleuth. She and her coterie of devoted helpers can ransack a house for clues faster than it takes a fingerprint to set.

When Callahan Garrity gets caught in a liquor store holdup on the way home from a St. Paddy's Day party, one of her best friends is shot. Callahan and her House Mouse cleaning crew dive into the investigation - only to discover that her old friend might have been working both sides of the law as an accomplice in a string of robberies. It will take every trick they've got to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding an Irish police organization and prove that the case is more than it seems. 

Callahan used to be a police officer and changed careers when she bought House Mouse, a cleaning service that she runs with her mother, Edna ... but she still does private investigating on the side.

Callahan goes to a St. Patrick Day's party with her best friend, Bucky, put on by the Shamrock Society, a drinking club for Irish police officers.  Bucky wants her to meet his new girlfriend, Lisa, who he is in love with, something that has never happened to Bucky before.  Lisa is a cop and is tied up with a case and doesn't show up.  When Bucky gives Callahan a drive home, he makes at stop at a liquor store along the way where he is shot twice in the head.  It's reported that that clerk working in the store disappeared that night with the store video of what happened and lots of money from the store safe.

Bucky is essentially brain dead and Callahan starts to investigate how this happened to her friend ... was he targeted or was in the wrong place at the wrong time?  She learns that he has been working part-time doing security at the store and other members of the Shamrock Society do security at other stores and restaurants in which the owners are eventually robbed at ATMs.  Coincidence?!

In the meantime, Mac, Callahan's longtime boyfriend has been offered a job five hours away in Nashville and he wants Callahan and Edna to go with him.  Edna's psyched but something is holding Callahan back from making the move.

The writing was okay.  It is written in first person perspective in Callahan's voice.  Because it was originally written in the late 1990s and is set in the late 1990s, they are still using pay phones, answering machines, cheques, VCRs, etc. Some of the terms used are now cringe-worthy such as the "N-word" and "coloured" which makes the book seem racist.  As a head's up, there is swearing and violence.

This is the eighth (and last) in the Callahan Garrity Mystery Series. Though part of a series, it works as a stand alone as there is enough background provided.  It wasn't a great series but I read them all.  This book ended really depressingly rather than happily as most series do, which was surprising.