The Boy with the Crow (Memento Mori #1), Jern Tonkoi

Description

The Boy with the Crow
(Memento Mori, Book One)
Paperback – January 15, 2026
by Jern Tonkoi

The Boy with the Crow is a moody, rain-soaked paperback crime novel set in Cork, Ireland, where the past refuses to stay buried and invisibility proves impossible. Mason Maloney, a reclusive coder, lives a tightly controlled life in a cramped attic overlooking the River Lee. He clings to routine, clean logic, and solitude, keeping his past at arm’s length while a human skull watches silently from a shelf above his screen.

When the body of Cassandra, a Dublin art dealer, surfaces in the river, Mason’s carefully constructed isolation begins to unravel. Detective Sergeant Brianna Friday has a knack for finding weak seams, and Mason soon finds himself under a scrutiny he neither wants nor knows how to escape. Tim Button, a visiting academic with an inconvenient curiosity, keeps circling the case, while Arty Armitage re-enters Mason’s life with an unsettling calm and an intimacy that cuts too close to old wounds.

As the investigation tightens, Cork itself begins to feel like a closed room. Ghosts whisper at the edges of memory, suspicion sharpens, and an art-and-money trail stretches far beyond the city’s rain-dark streets. Mason’s need for control collides with forces that refuse to be managed, threatening the fragile life he has built and the illusion that logic alone can keep chaos at bay.

Dark, atmospheric, and psychologically charged, The Boy with the Crow blends noir sensibilities with queer crime fiction. It is the first book in the Memento Mori series but can be read as a standalone novel.

Content notes: strong language; explicit sex between men; moderate violence and peril.