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IRISH LINEN by Andrew M. Greeley

IRISH LINEN

by Andrew M. Greeley

Pub Date: Feb. 6th, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31586-6
Publisher: Forge

Nuala Anne McGrail Coyne, “singer, accountant, actress, detective, wife, mother, lover” and brilliant at the lot, is tasked in her tenth (Irish Crystal, 2006, etc.) with locating a lad likely lost somewhere in the wilds of Iraq.

The demands of family life are something terrible—two dogs, three kids, one of them nursing, to say nothing of a terminally besotted husband’s connubial needs. If a Galway lass is to search for a missing boy, it must be without stirring a gorgeous foot from her neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. But when the parents of the idealistic, much-loved Desmond Doolin come calling with that bereft look in their eyes, Nuala Anne rises to the occasion by calling on her second sight, a “ding” made possible since, among her other talents, she is one of “the dark ones.” Meanwhile, hubby Dermot Michael pores over a World War II manuscript that tells the tale of Timmy Pat Clarke, Irish ambassador to Nazi Germany. Colorful as that is, it has little enough to do with vanished young Doolin, though in a tale so loosely plotted, digressions don’t matter. What does matter is adherence to the kitschy formula that’s earned Father Greeley his faithful fan base. Nuala Anne and Dermot Michael speak in stage-Oirish brogues, engage in a modicum of ratiocination, make protracted love and unabashedly, unwaveringly, unremittingly extol their kind as the Creator’s anointed.

Irish chutzpah.