Patrick Taylor is probably better known for his Irish Country books but as this books shows he can write a darker style of fiction too. This book takes place in Northern Ireland and also in Vancouver. Taylor has lived in both places and the little details he works into the writing make the settings very realistic.

In 1983 the Irish Troubles were in full swing. The Irish Provisional Army (the Provos) had been fighting a guerrilla style war against the British army forces to gain independence in the six northern counties that had been left as part of Britain when the rest of Ireland gained indepence. Many civilians had been killed in the ongoing battle. Some Provos saw their deaths as a necessary evil but Davy McCutcheon had finally come to see them as unacceptable. In 1974 he had promised his girlfriend, Fiona Kavanagh, that he would do one final job and then emigrate to Canada with her. Instead he was caught by the British forces and imprisoned in the Kesh. Fiona left Ireland and moved to Vancouver herself where she tried to forget about Davy. Now Davy has a chance to break out of the Kesh with a bunch of other Provos. His friend Jimmy has just run into Fiona in Vancouver and sent him her picture. That impetus persuades him to join the breakout in the hopes he could be reunited with her. The odds against making it are long.

It has always astonished me how bloody the conflict between holders of different religious faiths can become. The epilogue to this book starts out as follows:
In the twenty-five years of internecine strife (1969-94) in Northern Ireland, 3,268 people were killed and more than thirty thousand wounded. The Troubles didn't even end in 1994 although a peace process started then. It took until 2007 for the process to finish. The British Army ended Operation Banner in July 2007, thirty-eight years after it started. In a way, I find it heartening to have lived to see this. If Northern Ireland could finally achieve peace then perhaps other areas of the world can also do so. ( )