Short Storm

By David Hegarty

In all of Ireland, it seems there is no more beautiful or peaceful place than the tranquil fishing village of Rinnemor…

The rest of the country might be in political upheaval, with the IRA a constant disruption to life, but Rinnemor has always remained in the eye of Ireland’s terrorist tornado.

With the arrival of a short, two-day storm, however, all that is about to change…

Sean Doyle and his wife Eileen are pillars of the Rinnemor community, and with the purchase of a new trawler they are set to blaze a trail into the future of the fishing industry. But even the most successful pillars have secrets to hide.

For the Doyles, that secret is Steven Cullen, Eileen’s brother and the black sheep of the family, whose involvement with the IRA has landed him in more hot water than he’d care to admit.

Recently escaped from prison, Cullen is on the run from the British and Irish governments as well as the IRA, and his only hope for escape lies with Sean’s trawler and a rendezvous with disreputable and malicious Frenchman Marcel Gustav.

But Cullen’s flight to freedom is cut abruptly short when he is betrayed – and instead of the liberty of the French coast, he finds himself being driven back towards the source of all his problems.

And those problems are about to rain a world of troubles down on the heads of Sean and Eileen Doyle…

David Hegarty comes from the coastal town of Wexford, in the South East corner of Ireland. While showing sharp observation for the activities of people on both sides of the law, his stories, set in rural areas, show how the apparent quiet and tranquillity of the country can be as infested with the disease of crime as any teeming metropolis. He is widely regarded as Ireland’s grittiest thriller writer. His narratives catch a grimly humorous view of events which can take over, and ultimately destroy, or salvage, the lives of ordinary people, caught in a situation they neither want nor understand.