The Lepers of Baile Baiste

Book excerpt: Baile Baiste is "come day, go day" until Daithi O'Neill returns and sends the quiet Irish town reeling under the weight of recrimination. As a decade or more of secret guilt and resentment ends, four young men must come to terms with the abuse in their past. Daithi's violent churchyard thievery puts the blame where Daithi says it should be: at the feet of Father Gannon and the absent but never forgotten Brother Angelus. When Father Gannon refuses to acknowledge the past, the church's secrets flood through the parish and rip apart the town, the bulwark of faith embodied by Sergeant Michael O'Brien and the town's sensitive, fragile clown.