After the Rising & Before the Fall

Preface

Preface

This is the second book in a trilogy about an Irish family and an unsolved murder in the past that causes great suffering in the present. Before the Fall picks up where After the Rising left off and continues to be narrated by Jo Devereux in the same hot summer of 1995. We now know who killed Barney, Jo’s great-uncle—or we think we do—but who killed the person who killed him?

The answer plunges Jo back into Rory’s arms and further under the surface story of nationalist politics she’s been bequeathed, into a the far more primal struggle: that between men and women.

For a century the 1920s civil war conflict in Ireland has been known as ‘The War of The Brothers’ but in this book, I wanted to pay tribute to the sisters: the many women who, in the words of Jo’s Granny Peg and my own