"Intriguing suspense full of many surprises."

Father Michael Driscoll has found a new life and a new vocation at the Spanish mission church of San Xavier de Bac. Nonetheless, a mysterious screaming cry for help heard only by him while kneeling in prayer and a call to him from his past love, quickly unearths the past from which he ran away. Taking an unauthorized leave of absence plus a bit of something from the collection plate for plane fare to Ireland to save Lydia, he sets his collar aside in the memory of love.

Once in Ireland, his past embraces him ruthlessly. He returns to Lydia only to find someone has brutally murdered her and her son, and the long arm of the law reaches out to try to frame him for the deed. Deputy Chief Inspector Claire Burke with an agenda all her own, hands him her own brand of "get out of jail card" so he can investigate what went horribly wrong. All of the clues lead him back to his second cousins, the heads of the Irish mob, the O'Driscolls. The deeper he investigates, the deeper he is drawn back to his past and the family he so desperately sought to escape in America. Suddenly he is in the middle of a familiar family war, reaching across both sides of the ocean to pull him in and he can trust no one. Will the priest Michael longs to be and the dark avenger inside him come to grips with one another, or will he be forced to choose between the two forever?

Compton takes the reader on a thrilling ride of deception, misconception, murder and mayhem. Just when you think everything is lining up, another path is blown to bits with each page turned. This book is a missive of suspense and a missal of controversy, guaranteed to carry the reader along to thrilling heights and chilling lows. This story is a must for any fan of intrigue and suspense.

Reviewed by Anne Barringer
Posted July 20, 2004

Father Michael Driscoll's hunt for the killer of a heroin- addicted former lover places him in the middle of a major crime family's deadly power struggle over a multi-million- dollar Powerball payoff. Notoriously brutal, their most primordial savagery is reserved for informers, sparing no one, not even blood relatives-not even Michael Driscoll.