Zara O'Connor is an Irish-born writer from Limerick whose work traces the charged borderlands between crime, technology, and the sea across fiction and nonfiction. Based between Dublin and Key West, she crews on a friend's sloop out of Stock Island and brings the precision of a former court reporter and night-shift copy editor to everything she writes.
Drawing on criminology studies at University College Cork and later work consulting for a Miami cybersecurity firm, O'Connor explores how digital footprints intersect with tide tables, patrol routes, and human incentives. Her books span memoir, narrative nonfiction, and romance-tinged procedural fiction, including Sextant: A Chronicle (2024), the seafaring life memoir The Golden Mountain (2025), and the coastal procedural romance Something About Mercury (2025). The Golden Mountain was shortlisted for a Munster arts award.
She writes with an investigator's discipline and a mariner's eye, bringing clarity to stories of coastal economies, navigation, and the choices people make when weather—and politics—close in. She lives between the Grand Canal and the Gulf Stream with a rescue terrier named Clove.
