“Irish Lace”  by Andrew M. Greeley

Review #56 

Main Characters: Nuala Anne McGrail (Irish Immigrant) and Dermot Michael Coyne
This is the second in a series of “Irish” books written by Greeley. The above characters star in all of them.

Nuala (pronounced, "Noola") Anne McGrail is a 20-year-old Irish immigrant, beautiful, psychic, a gifted singer, charmingly fey and now in Chicago. This Chicago is peopled by large Irish-Catholic, Democratic families of overachievers. An exception is hero and narrator Dermot Michael Coyne, who has made an accidental killing on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and retired, at the age of 25, to write. He also moons over Nuala: they love each other but are not about to rush the relationship. 


 As in all of the “Irish” stories, there are two mysteries here, one involving Nuala and Dermot, the other a fictional story based on and in the middle of a real historical event! In this book, the first involves recent robberies in Chicago's upscale art galleries that an ambitious prosecutor links to an I.R.A. conspiracy; the second centers around the major psychic pain Nuala Anne has suffered at the site of a Civil War prison camp (now a modern sub-division of houses). As Dermot unearths the story of the Camp Douglas conspiracy to set Confederate prisoners free, (over a hundred years ago), Greeley uses a long (fictional) letter of real-life Letitia Walsh to tell the story of her Peace Democrat father's trumped-up arrest.

Greeley moves effortlessly between the fictional conspiracies of 1864 and 1995 Chicago, throwing in a few stinging words about racism and xenophobia and delivering a rousing defense of the Bill of Rights.

You will find the heros charming and the book fun to read!