Irish Novels

In a Dark Wood

To be published May 15, 2026

Eighteen-year-old Eleanor’s world is falling apart. Her parents fight night and day. There’s no money. Popular girls persecute her at school, and she really needs her refuge in an ancient wood on a nearby estate,...only the wood is occasionally a bit strange. Shadows should not try to pull her into darkness, nor should she be saved by an estate housecleaner who may be some sort of Otherworld queen. She should not glimpse things that happened centuries before., She should not fall, well,. in love with a boy hiding in the Wood despite his medieval clothes and unfamiliarity with English. Is she perhaps going crazy and imagining him and the rest?

The other problem is the wood is about to be leveled. She'd really rather that didn't happen, but she is not a person who is comfortable standing up against the government, Sertex Corp and her own father. The whole thing is becoming just a bit too serious, and even if mysterious enemies don't manage to kill her, it is definitely not fair, that she may have give up everything she cares about, including the boy, to save the Wood.

Underground, June 2026

It’s 1900 and eighteen-year-old Irishman Sean doesn’t want to be in London. He doesn’t want his fancy job in the cavernous British Museum, especially after he is pulled into a feud between a well-intentioned if not very competent detective and flamboyantly deadly Lord Winterbourne. The detective thinks Winterbourne controls some kind of dark force that he’s using to control minds, creating mindlessly happy minions with whom he intends to wreak havoc. Sean thinks this sort of thing is a bit unlikely, but then his best friend falls under Winterbourne’s spell.

Nobody will believe him about what Lord Winterbourne, and for allies, there’s only the detective’s odd and rather attractive foreign assistant, plus a laconic Native American medicine man hiding in the basement. With Winterbourne and the spirit are angry pixies demanding guns: a squad of murderous, mustachioed ex-army men, enraged romantic rivals from the Classics Department and a rogue government department. Raids, pursuits, thefts and infiltrations, above and below ground, must be kept secret from the everyday world, until they no longer can be, and Sean, the medicine man and the detective’s beautiful assistant go underground to see if there is a way to disarm the hungry darkness before it goes big time.

UNDERGROUND is Sherlock Holmes and Monty Python meet ancient Irish myth: a seriously entertaining fantasy that stands on its own, but is also the first book in a series.

To The Wars, July 2026

Teig is an agent for the exiled king of Great Britain and Ireland in 1719, and can’t let himself care about anything but the cause. On a mission, he meets Maire, a mysterious Irishwoman who reawakens his heart. The problem is that she turns out to be a traitor working for the English, and he will now have to hunt her down to kill her.

Maire has lost everything except her two young children, and they are being used by her “Master”, (the English spymaster who interrogated and tortured her and with whom she developed a twisted, dependent, love-hate relationship) to force her to work against her own people. Can she break free of the Master and somehow save her children, while also avoiding Teig’s attempts to kill her? Can she deal with her affection for Teig, a man who seemed to understand her sorrow?

Teig pursues her through the noble courts and back alleys of France and England while she struggles to outwit her Master and escape him. In a world where almost nothing -- even love -- is as it seems, neither Teig nor Maire may be able to escape the web of deceit and death that kings and spymasters weave.

Island in a Green Wood, August 2026

Eighth-century Ireland...Seventeen-year-old Donal’s father abandoned him as a baby and went into the wild to learn magic. Donal has made a sort of life for himself at a bardic college, but one morning, soldiers come looking for him. Then an Otherworld woman tells him in vision that he has to rescue his father. If it was his decision, he'd go back to the Library.

Before he goes a mile, his uncle is dead and he is running from something he’d thought existed only in old tales. A grinning idiot saves him by opening a door in a mountain. The idiot turns out to be a magician—or something worse—leading Donal further into a land sliding into strangeness.

Friendship and betrayal, love and hate are more perplexing than magic, sharper than any sword. Who can Donal trust? The learned fellowship that offers him refuge conceals bloody insanity. The forest girl has her own secrets. Every moment presents a choice. Has Donal learned enough to choose the road that will take him out of nightmare?

Island in the Green Wood is informed by long familiarity with the Celtic languages and with the terse lyricism of Old Irish tales

Ghosts, October 2026

Margaret is doing her best to make a life for herself as a young scholar in 1960s Ireland, a time and place where women in the University is a very new idea. She discovers an unusual old manuscript that seems to tell the story of a young Irishman of the 16th century, but is is a fake? Her investigations take her to surprising places and into confusing relationships.

16th-century Teig saw his family killed when he was a child, but trauma demons still torment him, never mind what appears to be his safe tedious life in an English fortress town. His employer frames him for murder and Teig is on the run from Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers again. In an Irish mountain kingdom, he is mistaken for a hero, and it is easier to pretend to be one than to admit he's a coward and fool. The beautiful Isobel even falls in love with the man she thinks he is.

It turns out Teig is not the only person who’s lying. The king’s son is the Queen’s lover, and his rivalry with his father may destroy the kingdom from the inside, but he recognizes Teig as another tormented soul and befriends him. Everything is fine maybe until the English general who killed Teig’s childhood family sets his sights on the mountain kingdom, and Teig must either face demons and become the hero he pretended to be, or watch Isobel and all the others be killed.

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Back in 1960, Margaret 's investigations also bring her face to face with the heart of darkness, in the way she sometimes thinks there is a link between her and Teig or the unknown third person she suspects is behind the whole thing.

Editor & Writer

Freelance Author