Mason Maloney keeps a skull above his monitor and the world at a safe distance.

In his attic room in Cork, Mason has code, rituals, a green cap, and enough isolation to survive the day. Then Cassandra O'Neill is pulled from the River Lee, and the death he tells himself is none of his business begins to reach for him anyway.

Cassandra belonged to another life: art money, old favours, Arty Armitage, and the kind of attention Mason has spent years avoiding. Detective Bria Friday has questions. Tim keeps seeing too much. Arty has a way of making the past feel like a room Mason has never really left.

As Cork closes in through rain, gossip, police pressure, and old secrets, Mason's carefully controlled life starts to fracture. The case is not only about who killed Cassandra. It is about what Mason knows, what he has hidden, and why the skull in the attic still feels like it is watching.

The Boy with the Crow is Book 1 in the Memento Mori trilogy: rain-dark Cork psychological crime with explicit queer intimacy, moral ambiguity, moderate violence/peril, and a continuing emotional arc best read in order.