On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove--to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife--"that the hours of his life belong to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child....

PI Matt Scudder sets out to learn who is trying to kill Mick Ballou, a gangster who is his friend and who has become the object of several assassination attempts. A dangerous assignment as Scudder himself becomes a target.

Set in the Sixties, McDermott's third novel tells the story of an extended Irish-American family observed primarily through the eyes of the children, a son and two daughters. Time circles backwards and forwards around a variety of family rituals: holiday meals, vacations at the shore, the wedding of a favorite aunt. The poignant middle-aged romance that develops between the aunt, a former nun, and her suitor, a shy mailman, exacerbates already pronounced...

In New York City in 1845, Timothy Wilde is tending bar when his dreams are incinerated in a downtown fire leaving Timothy disfigured, unemployed, and homeless; when Timothy's older brother gets him a job on the NYPD in the down-and-out Sixth Ward, Timothy runs into a little girl covered with blood.

Six months after the formation of the NYPD, its most reluctant and talented officer, Timothy Wilde, thinks himself well versed in his city's dark practices -- until he learns of the gruesome underworld of lies and corruption ruled by the "blackbirders," who snatch free Northerners of color from their homes, masquerade them as slaves, and sell them South to toil as plantation property. The abolitionist Timothy is horrified by these traders in human...

Reluctantly embroiled in a 1840s dispute between a corrupt Tammany Hall leader and an arsonist with an agenda, Copper Star Timothy Wilde finds his investigation challenged by his brother's decision to run for public office.

"At the renowned Irish Meadows horse farm in New York, 1911, sisters Brianna and Colleen O'Leary struggle to reconcile their own dreams with their father's plans for the farm and his demanding marriage expectations"--