The Sugar Loaf Mysteries & Other Stories

Following his well-received memoir, Far From The Land: An Irish Memoir(2010), two award-winning novellas, "Hard Truths"(2012) and Carby's Fate(2015), and the acclaimed collection of short stories, Rites of Passage: Five Irish Stories(2016), readers have come to expect masterful storytelling of a distinctive dramatic style from Thomas Rice. Complex characters, mostly underdogs, "ordinary heroes," who show courage and resilience against the odds, keep their dignity, and live to tell the tale.

In The Sugar Loaf Mysteries & Other Stories, Rice delivers seven finely crafted tales that are at all times entertaining, with new characters and plot twists that will linger well beyond the closing lines. First, in the title story, we meet a local heroine, Kitty Cusack, whose reputation as a freedom fighter and defender of the downtrodden is bent to a craven purpose, exposing the darker side of human nature. In a lighter vein, but with human resilience on full display, we meet a school dropout with heroic aspirations who is deep-ended into the gritty realities of farming. We get invited to a "rambling house" gathering where we learn that history dies hard-if at all-as we witness a hilariously botched attempt at keeping a secret in a community that knows no such thing. In "October Winds," we are privy to a poignant exchange between a proud itinerant mother with hungry children as she begs for food from a farmer, resulting in a shocking revelation. "The Last Laugh" takes us inside a family auction where generations of hard work and family tradition are put to the gavel, an uprooting that will leave scars on all concerned.