Pavel Barter’s gripping true-crime investigation into murder, reinvention, respectability & a six decade manhunt.

Runaway Joe: A Murder, A Hidden Identity, A Six-Decade Manhunt is Pavel Barter’s new 320-page true-crime investigation, published in April 2026. Barter is a reporter for The Sunday Times in Ireland and a documentary-maker, and the book grows out of the award-winning RTÉ Documentary On One podcast of the same name.

In 1967, in Rochester, New York, Joseph Maloney was alleged to have poisoned his wife, June, at their son’s fifth birthday party. While awaiting trial in the psychiatric wing of a hospital, he escaped. Years later, he surfaced in Dublin as Michael O’Shea, built a new life in the suburbs of Glenageary and Dalkey, bought a grand country estate in County Laois, and carved out a career in the Irish film industry, working as an armourer on productions including Remington Steele. Then he slipped away again after a 1985 extradition case collapsed on a technicality.

This is, obviously, catnip to anyone with even a passing interest in true crime, Irish social history, or the eternal mystery of how some men can commit horror and still be described as “lovely company.” Which is one of the things that makes Runaway Joe so unsettling. It is not just about a fugitive. It is about performance. About how easily a man can put on a better suit, borrow a nicer accent, acquire a little local status, and be welcomed straight into the room.

What Barter understands, and what makes the book so compelling, is that the most frightening men are not always the obviously monstrous ones. Sometimes they are pillars of society. Sometimes they are polished. Sometimes they are the sort of men other men admire and women are expected to accommodate. O’Shea was remembered in Ireland as a respected figure in south County Dublin who moved in political and even aristocratic circles, which is part of what gives the story its real chill.

There is a great deal of true crime now that feels like content in a trench coat: overproduced, underthought, and faintly delighted with itself. Runaway Joe is not that. It is measured, forensic and angry in the right places. It does not leer. It does not flirt with sensationalism. Instead, it keeps returning us to the damage, to his wife June, to the family, to the long tail of violence and the ugly elasticity of male self-invention.

It also has that particularly addictive quality of the best investigations, which is that every answer opens onto a fresh little chamber of disbelief. You read on partly because you want resolution, and partly because your faith in civilisation has already been dented and you may as well continue. It is the literary equivalent of saying, “I’ll just read one more chapter,” and then finding yourself forty pages deep, furious, fascinated, and making dark little noises in your throat.

What lifts the book above straightforward case-file intrigue is its texture. There is America in the background, of course, with all its mythologies of disappearance and reinvention. But there is Ireland too, and the book is especially sharp on that old, familiar weakness for the charming operator, the plausible man, the fella who seems grand. We have, as a people, occasionally been too hospitable to performance. A decent line in respectability can get you very far.

This is not a book for readers who want neatness or comfort. It is for readers who like their non-fiction clever, unsettling and morally precise. It will suit anyone who loved the podcast, certainly, but it also works beautifully on its own, because Barter knows that the real hook here is not simply “what happened?” but “how on earth was he allowed to become someone else?”

Bleak, gripping and horribly readable, Runaway Joe is one of those books that reminds you true crime is at its best when it is not really about crime alone. It is about class, charm, power, gender, memory, and the stories societies tell themselves in order not to look too closely at the men in front of them.

A very good read, then, if by “good” we mean deeply absorbing and liable to leave you suspicious of anyone too smooth in a blazer.