And what a stew it is. Here are some of the ingredients: Our heroine, Nuala Anne McGrail, in her guise as international singing star, accompanied by her spear-carrying husband, Dermot Coyne, is off to a major music festival in Milan, where they meet Seamus Costelloe, a Chicago Irish macher, and his family. Seamus is no better than he should be, and in fact the suspicion is that he's very bad indeed, but softhearted Nuala sees the sign of death on him-she hasn't lost her ability to see into the future-and decides to do something about it. She also sees something good in him. Which leads to a few hair-raising conflicts with some of Chicago's more desperate characters.
Nuala and Dermot's new baby is premature, and dark clouds hover over their sublimely happy marriage. Meanwhile, Dermot is trying to solve the mystery of Chicago's Haymarket riot, which isn't easy since it happened over a hundred years ago.
Only bestselling author Andrew M. Greeley, with his knowledge of Ireland and Chicago's unsavory politics, plus his uncanny ability to combine two stories-one in the present and one in the past-and his talent for building mystery and suspense to an almost unbearable degree, could have written this truly tantalizing novel.
"Father Greeley has given great attention to the role of imagination in the life of faith. What he is doing is re-evangelizing the imagination, using fiction to address the faith and the mysteries of the faith. That's an extraordinarily significant project."
Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago
"Nobody has ever left the church because of an Andrew Greeley novel, but many have been attracted back to it by him."
