Book review: Rushed mess that badly needed an edit

Richard Satchwell murdered his wife Tina at their Co Cork home in 2017.

• Beneath The Stairs: The Disappearance of Tina Satchwell and the Discovery That Shocked a Nation 
• Ralph Riegel and Paul Byrne 
• Hachette Books Ireland, €17.99 

What a morass, what jumble. This book, based on one of the longest-running murder sagas in today’s Ireland, is poorly structured and grossly over-written. 

It is mired in irrelevant detail and afflicted with psychomancy — even a Fermoy hearse driver, surely a bit player in the melodrama, gets an honourable mention. 

The book, written with the breathlessness of a potboiler designed to tease, is burdened with myriad repetitions.

Foremost among those is murderer Richard Satchwell’s declarations of undying love for his wife Tina Dingivan, who he killed and buried in their home at 3 Grattan St, Youghal, Co Cork, in March 2017. 

That the nuts and bolts of story are revealed in the eight-page prologue almost makes wading through the subsequent 355 pages unnecessary.

Satchwell’s claim, false as so much of his testimony was, that she left him and fled with their savings of €26,000 is repeated so often that anyone susceptible to fantasy or indoctrination might eventually believe the lie. 

The killer, portrayed as an immature fantasist and a petty criminal with 14 previous convictions, may have believed that lie, and others, as he had repeated it so often.

That, after he buried his wife under the stairs of their dilapidated home, he continued to live there though it was carpeted by dog and parrot faeces points to an instability that went unrecognised for far too long. 

The couple’s beyond-all-reason obsession with their pets — “our babies” — was another hint that something beyond the rational was in play.

Yet, the first Garda investigation into Tina’s disappearance yielded no worthwhile results.

It took several years, and a significant change in Garda leadership, to do what might have been done in the initial stages of the investigation.

That Satchwell’s life sentence was achieved by the efforts of the second team of gardaí hardly excuses their predecessors’ failure.

The book is also burdened with the frequent incongruity of one of the authors — veteran Irish Independent reporter Ralph Riegel — being offered, in the third person, as a commentator-cum-actor in the drama.

The book’s fluency would have been enhanced had this, and co-author’s Paul Byrne’s multiple interviews with Satchwell, been better managed.

The sense of gilding the lily, obvious even in the book’s subtitle — The Disappearance of Tina Satchwell and the Discovery That Shocked a Nation — is all too obvious. 

We may have had our interest piqued and had, unlike Tina’s family and friends, only a passing interest in the tragedy but to suggest we were shocked relies on the sensibilities of a long-gone time.

Unfortunately, it is hard to think an Irish book published since the turn of the century more in need of firm, informed, and professional editing. 

That process, and the professionalism that implies, would have done justice to what remains an engaging fable. 

That the publishers did not include an index, surely mandatory in any book recording factual events, also undermines the publication. 

Like the first Garda investigation into Tina Satchwell’s disappearance, this book is, sadly, an opportunity lost.