The Roof Walkers

Christmas, 1864, in the last years of the civil war, a twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, Eoin O’Donoghue, is newly hired as the personal secretary to the prospective head of the Irish Republican Army in New York, William R. Roberts. Appalled that the mayhem he sees around him is also being planned for his own country, Eoin offers his services to Gilbert McMicken, head of Canada’s secret police. So begins the trajectory of what Eoin himself calls, self-disparagingly, his “Judas informantcy.” Against a backdrop of fusion and collapse, 600,000 Americans dead, one nation, Canada, about to be created, another to its south in disarray, Irish militants plan northward raids to win a “New Ireland” on the continent (its capital, Sherbrooke, QC), to split Ireland itself off from Great Britain, and to avenge reverse, cross-border Southern terror plots hatched in Montreal and approved by Jefferson Davis. Under assumed names, safely housed in the Moffat Mansion on Union Square live the secret, illegitimate twin daughters of James Stephens, IRA leader in Europe. Who will capture Eoin O’Donoghue’s allegiance–his Fenian employer, Deirdre Hopper (Stephens), accomplished painter and musician and daughter of the leader in Dublin, or Canadian spymaster Gilbert McMicken, who regularly insists his protégé provide “less poetry and more police work?”rn