Laura Joyce Moriarty

Recommend reading The Irish Suspect first. In the first of this series, The Irish Suspect, Dan Delaney is a first class detective in Dublin, Ireland who was blamed for a poorly prosecuted case of a child murder, and suffered severe recriminations by the public and in his career. After three years of work, he unravels a double homicide in the case of The Irish Suspect, and public opinion sways to his favor. He is promoted to Police Commissioner and his partner, Joe Murphy, is promoted to the position of Deputy Commissioner. In the case of The Dirty Dubliner, the previous Commissioner who had covered the investigation on a child murder has been relieved of his duties and his reputation of brutal, personally motivated murders as well as contracted assassinations are exposed.

My earliest memories were completely absorbed by what I was learning when I was in Church. It seemed as if we were there all the time, and I was always happy to be anywhere where there were books that followed along with what was being read . . . with the help of my father or mother who would show me the page and the first word the priest said, --- Gospel or EpistleI specifically remember hearing about St. Peter when Jesus said, "Upon this rock I shall build My Church." I can't explain my thoughts, but remember collecting handfuls of stones along Lake Erie when we went to Catawba Island. I would examine each one and imagine the life of the stone that had to be a real person from another time or place.Now when I write a fictional piece about an unknown person, I know the real life I imagine was fraught with unthinkable toil, boredom, and unhappiness. As a result, I search for the story behind the drudgery. I know the soul of the person, like all humans, who seek relief from their mental anguish through fantasies of something better . . . a new dress, a happy marriage, children, . . . enough money for the family to live into the future, . . . something with a happy ending . . . basically, I find the fantasies that existed within that soul. The following writings are reflections of some of those dreams . . . evidence of God's wisdom and hope that comes with divine faith.

About the Book Fewer and fewer religious leaders preach love for the disadvantaged, the sick, the poor, or those who are different. Instead, many of them sell their promises of salvation to the highest bidders. Worse they preach wealth, good health, and good luck as God's demonstration of favor. In fact, if you listen carefully, you may have come to believe that God Himself endears wealth and easy living. More and more leaders are blatantly dishonest, hypocritical, and corrupt. Haters carry their signs swearing that they know what Christ wants and yet do nothing Christian. Is it true that His message of faith, hope, and charity is a fraud for suckers? The power of wealth is so crushing and defeating, that you may think God has deserted the victims, and cares only for those hungry for power and decadent wealth. That is because the rationalization behind greed makes it a hard temptation to control. Like an addictive drug, its domination over people's decisions grows as more and more riches and personal power accumulates. Greed is not the only deadly sin of our protagonist. In this novel, a man born into super wealth is not only insatiable, but his excessive self-indulgence leads him into an unprecedented life of crime. To his utter disbelief, he is completely unaware that his ravenous appetite for seeking pleasure and decadence leads to sins that are permanently recorded on his soul. Only when he is rejected by God and sentenced to live in a piece of wood, that is, an existence of painful contemplation, does he become aware of his errors. The worst of human behavior is contrasted by characters who follow God's acts of supreme blessedness known as The Beatitudes. They are people who practice faith, hope and charity. Their lives demonstrate typical human existence as they labor over mundane decisions just to survive. They struggle with adversity, fear, and hardship. These individuals are also unaware that their good works and labors of peace are permanently recorded.

Eizea Jayne Grayson believes herself to be a misfit. After all, she's generally ignored by everyone---even bullied. Ordinarily, such a child would be completely sad, but Eizea has a loving mother who nourishes her ferocious appetite for reading and writing, and supplies her with an endless supply of novels---even some adult novels. When Eizea Jayne reads The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain, she is transformed by the exotic story of two English knights who travel into the Middle East. There they save a slave from a harem. Eizea is completely ignorant of the word harem and goes to the library and asks for help. At first she is worried. Since her teachers had never trusted her reports of adult level reading, she feared the librarian would scold her. Instead, she is given a reference manual and is shocked to see how women are bought as slaves for harems. At first she wonders if the women wanted to be bought, because sometimes they were smiling, and wore fantastical clothes. The librarian explains: "There are no good lives for slaves of any sort. It would be a better world if there were no slaves anywhere." Initially, Eizea's report is thrown out of the competition because of the subject matter. The School Board objected to the topic and asked her to write on another topic. Instead, her mother decides what she really needs is a school that will nourish her exceptional mind. This discovery transformed Eizea. She writes a winning report on the exploitation of young girls in a state-wide competition. Following her dream, she travels the world as a journalist and writes a Pulitzer Prize winning expos on sex slaves.

About the book . . . Dan Delaney grew up in New Jersey and went to Princeton before entering the Army when Pearl Harbor was attacked. After an extensive tour of duty during and after World War II, he discovers his roots and takes a position as a detective in Dublin. He is nearly sixty when he is finally promoted to Police Commissioner of Dublin, Ireland and soon thereafter, gains a far-reaching reputation for solving complicated double murder cases. In the case of The American Murders, Dan is called to the States to help solve two murders in the Tampa - St. Petersburg area of Florida, but before he even takes off from Dublin, another request takes him into Cleveland, Ohio where a bank vice president and a low level bookie are both presumed dead. All of the murders stem from post-Capone connections when bootlegging and racketeering openly controlled U.S. cities. This story picks up in 1961 when gangs and protection still poisoned American cities, but the giants of the past and their mafia partnerships have splintered, moved underground, and corrupted the operations of local governments and businesses. Once again, the persistent Irish sleuth pulls the missing pieces together and uncovers the strange connections that exist among all the murder victims.