In 1950's Boston, the Irish Republican Army is running guns and killing witnesses. Cal and Dante are committed to stopping them.When a body is discovered at the Charlestown locks—tarred, feathered and shot to death—it appears to be a gangland killing, and is almost immediately dismissed. However, Cal O'Brien's cousin, Boston PD detective Owen Lackey, recognizes the murder style as the typical retribution for IRA informers. Combined with a tip-off about a boat coming into Boston weighed down with stolen guns and ammunition, the body in the locks hints that much more may be at stake than a one-off hit.Serpents in the Cold introduced us to Cal and Dante, whose previous investigation brought them to the highest ranks of Boston's political elite. This time, Cal and Dante descend into the city's shadowy underbelly—a world of packed dance halls, Irish wakes, and funeral parlors. There they discover a terrorist plot that will shake...

- O'Malley sets a haunting local mystery against the tense backdrop of a country tormented by bloodshed and deep schisms.- In the tradition of Seamus Deane and John McGahern, a stirring, beautifully written, but unsentimental portrait of an Irish boyhood.- Thomas O'Malley's work has appeared in literary journals such as "Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, Gulf Stream, and "Blue Mesa Review.

A serial killer stalks the streets of 1950s Boston—and two friends take it upon themselves to take him down.Post-war Boston is down on its luck and looking for change. A year after the Brink's Robbery—the largest robbery in the history of the United States—Boston is known more for its seedy underbelly than for its rich, historical past. The winter of 1951 is the worst in recent memory, and the Bruins are suffering another losing season.Like the city itself, lifelong residents Cal O'Brien and Dante Cooper are struggling to find their identities after World War II. Cal has built a mildly promising life for himself as an employee of a company providing private security, whether to an honorable businessman who needs a nightwatchman or to an Irish mafioso who needs to have someone's legs broken. Dante is everything Cal is not. A heroin addict trying and failing to stay clean, Dante feels the call to do good after he discovers that his...

A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel about war, music, loneliness and the redemptive power of the imaginationDuncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost in the snowy expanse of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to him at his birth and gave him a special purpose.Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him. Maggie Bright, a soprano who was once the talent of her generation, now sings in a San Francisco bar through a haze of whisky cut with sharp regret. She often finishes up in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who earns his living as part of a tunneling crew seventy feet beneath the Bay. He smells of sea silt and loam, as if he has been dredged from the deep bottom of the world - and...