Wounded Heart, Broken Spirit

Unemployed and down in the dumps, twenty-seven year-old Michael Flynn stumbles upon a mystery he believes will pull him from the depths of a depression that is threatening to consume him. The photograph, purposely it seems, shoved to the bottom of an old shoebox belonging to his recently deceased grandmother, initially shocks him. Who is the woman whose gaunt and haunted expression chills him to the bone, and why was the late Ned O'Brien, his grandmother's older brother, horrified by what he saw in the photograph that he himself had taken twenty years earlier? The subsequent late night visitation, coupled with details contained in letters written home many years before by a young Ned O'Brien, sends Michael on a voyage of discovery from his home in Ireland to South Dakota, USA. The real motive for the impromptu visit of their Irish cousin will soon cast a dark shadow over the O'Brien household. Barbara, his teenage cousin, will initially prove to be his only ally. Ghosts, believed long since exorcised, resurface to kindle the fires of horrible events kept secret from a doting family for more than seventy years. The contents of a journal that has rested unopened in Ned O'Brien's study since his death become a horrifying indictment of what men will do to realise their own warped interpretation of 'The American Dream'. The lives of Ned O'Brien's well-to-do offspring will be changed forever and Michael Flynn will learn the harsh reality of the old adage - 'Be careful what you wish for'.

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