BEFORE THE FALL

An Irish historical murder mystery of love, revenge and redemption. It’s August in the long, hot summer of 1995 and Jo Devereux can’t believe that she still hasn’t returned home to San Francisco. Instead she remains on in Mucknamore, the small Irish village where she grew up, the home she’d left forever, twenty years before, a place with only bad memories for her. Jo returned months ago, pregnant and in despair, for her mother’s funeral. Now she’s done her mourning and the time for her to have her baby draws near. So what’s keeping her here in Ireland, in this crumbling shed at the edge of the ocean? Partly it’s reading and writing about her family experiences in the bitter Irish Civil War, the death of her great uncle, Barney Parle, at the hands of his best friend, Dan O’Donovan. This close-fought conflict, coming in the wake of the War of Independence and the peace treaty with Britain, had split the country, end to end: friend fighting friend, brother fighting brother — and sister. Now Jo must decide who led Dan to his grisly death and whether it was a tit-for-tat killing. Dan O’Donovan died by suffocation in Mucknamore’s notorious sinking sands. Could her beloved, gentle Granny Peg really have been capable of luring him out there, in revenge for the killing of her brother, as the diaries seem to suggest? Was her grandmother, as Jo would like to believe, innocent of all? Or did she have secrets of her own? And what role did Norah O’Donovan — Dan’s sister, Barney’s lover, and Peg’s best friend — play in these dramatic events of the past? Why had she lived with the Parle family, her family’s sworn enemies, for as long as Jo can remember? Combing the words of her ancestors for what has been left unsaid, Jo is unprepared for her own reactions, as she comes to realise the price she, and Ireland, had to pay for freedom. And how the fallout from the war of independence has passed down through the generations. Rory, Dan’s great-nephew, and her one great love, draws ever closer and Jo has to admit he may be the reason she can’t tear herself away. Could her mission to uncover their shared past be the key to a possible future? Or is she about to lose everything, all over again? Before the Fall is a sweeping, multigenerational tale set in 1920s and 1990s Ireland and 1980s San Francisco. It is the second book in The Irish Trilogy, and the sequel to After the Rising.