'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune
Ireland, 1651. A country ravaged by Oliver Cromwell's Act of Settlement. Under it, Fergal O'Breslin, a young clan chief, and his fellow Irish citizens are forced to leave their ancestral lands and travel to the cramped, rocky province of Connacht. There, honest men become robbers, proud men must beg, and despair and privation become a way of life.
Set against a panoramic backdrop of religious and political upheaval, Fergal and his clansmen struggle to wrest an existence out of a barren and inhospitable land under the yoke of English oppression.
In her 67 years, California author Elizabeth Linington wrote 82 crime fiction novels, under her own name as well as the aliases Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O'Neill and Dell Shannon. Her writing evolved from the early radio and stage dramas, via historical narratives, to her most celebrated novels - mysteries. She was nominated for Edgars in 1961, 1962 and 1963 for Case Pending, Nightmare and Knave of Hearts respectively. Her most successful creation, debonair LAPD Lieutenant Luis Mendoza, broke new ground in being one of the first Latino police officers in the procedural genre, and Linington herself was a pioneer in a male-dominated industry, earning the moniker 'Queen of the Procedurals'.