“[Anne Emery] really is a fine writer; not just a good storyteller but a stylist as well: every word of her prose feels carefully chosen for the way it interacts with the words around it.” — Booklist

Father Brennan Burke’s father, Declan, gathered up his family and fled Ireland under the cover of night four decades ago after disobeying an order from his commanding officer in the IRA. Declan has not set foot in Ireland since. Until now. Why now? And why not? What could go wrong after all this time? All he tells his family is that “it’s time” to see his beloved homeland again. But sons Brennan and Terry, knowing their father’s checkered past, suspect there is more to this sudden impulse than merely “it’s time,” so they insist on going with him.

And sure enough, when they get to Ireland, there are men in the shadows. Knowing. Waiting to settle old scores. After an evening in the pubs of Dublin, Declan and Brennan call it a night, but Terry isn’t ready to leave his barstool quite yet. The next morning when Brennan wakes up, he sees that Terry never came home. Had the men in the shadows missed their chance to grab Declan and taken Terry instead? Brennan and Declan are frantic to find him, and they call upon the services of Declan’s brother Finn and Brennan’s old friend Detective Shay Rynne. As Brennan searches for the motives behind this action against his family, he is joined by lawyer Monty Collins, and they learn things about Brennan’s father that he had never wanted revealed. The revelations are not limited to the Burke family’s long campaign against the British occupiers of their country. Some matters are much more personal.