Now and in the Hour of Our Death

The Irish Troubles of the 1970s and ’80s provide the background for Taylor’s suspenseful sequel to 2013’s Pray for Us Sinners. In 1983, Davy McCutcheon has served nine years of a 40-year sentence for arms possession and the murder of a British soldier during a raid on a Northern Ireland farmhouse where IRA soldiers were hiding—a raid that thwarted a plot to assassinate the British prime minister. Davy still dreams of his former lover, Fiona Kavanagh, who has built a new life for herself in Vancouver, British Columbia. Davy’s closest friend, Jimmy Ferguson, who has also settled in Vancouver, takes Fiona’s photo during a chance meeting and sends it to Davy. On seeing the photo, Davy decides to participate in an IRA-led prison break—and to participate in one last attack against the British before escaping, with IRA consent, to Vancouver. The moral ambiguities of the Irish conflict add to the novel’s complexity. Agent: Natalia Aponte, Aponte Literary. (July)