Hours of Gladness - Softcover

Thomas Fleming is a distinguished historian and the author of numerous critically acclaimed and bestselling novels. His masterpiece, The Officers' Wives, was an international bestseller with over two million copies sold. His novels Time and Tide and Liberty Tavern were both New York Times bestsellers. He is also the author of Liberty! The American Revolution, the companion volume to the PBS six-part miniseries. Thomas Fleming writes frequently for American Heritage magazine and is a contributing editor for the Quarterly Journal of Military History. He lives in New York City.

Gutsy, bed-pounding Irish-Americans tangle with the IRA, the Mafia, and a homicidal British spy masquerading as a Catholic priest, in a violent, sex-obsessed tale from prolific historical novelist Fleming (Remember the Morning, 1997, etc.). The New Jersey Shore town of Paradise Beach is close enough to Atlantic City to keep the descendants of Jersey City crime boss ``Sunny'' Dan Monaghan drunk, angry, or in trouble, especially when a family reunion is scheduled. Ex-marine Mick O'Day, now a Paradise Beach cop, haunts the gambling casino, trying to forget about bad deeds done in Viet Nam. The woman who led Mick down a path of betrayal, Trai Nguyen Phac, shares a trailer on the outskirts of town with her wife-beating killer of a husband and her Americanized son. Mick's mother, Barbara, pines away for her absent husband, while Mick's uncle, Police Chief Bill O'Toole, has his hands full running a mildly corrupt police department for Uncle Desmond McBride, who invested Sunny Dan's ill-gotten gains in a commercial fishing business. Desmond's son, Leo, is an aide for a congressman sympathetic to the IRA; Leo's wife, Melody, is a promiscuous aide to Senator Edward Kennedy. It's 1984, and, in an effort to help the boys in Belfast, the variously extended Monaghans have agreed to assist a satanically charming IRA commander and his psychotic henchman get their hands on a pile of surface-to-air missiles. The scheme requires Atlantic City hood ``Joey Zip'' Zaccaro to spend $1.5 million on a boatload of Cuban cocaine. But then Joey Zip and his psychotic henchman are blown away just as they're about to carve up the surgically enhanced body of coke-head Jackie Chasen. You could say things were getting out of hand. But high-school history teacher Alex Oxenford, a habitu of the local Irish pub, assures us that this is all about a search for the Irish- American soul. A coarse and creaky plot-boiler. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.