Richard T. Rook

What if the people you thought were your family really weren't? And what if you never left the place you thought you were from? Life gets complicated, but rewarding, when we finally force ourselves to look at it with no preconceived notions, and accept the consequences. Sometimes the important answers are delivered by ancestral spirits, if we're willing to open our ears.

I started writing in 2016, after forty years as a Massachusetts attorney and twenty years as a part-time consulting genealogist (still doing both). My short stories won many awards and gave me the courage to write "Tiernan's Wake" and the series it will become. The novel was a finalist for the 2017 Chaucer Award (historical fiction) by Chanticleer International Book Awards, and was Winner of the American Book Fest 2018 American Fiction Award (Mystery/Suspense: historical category).

What other novel will you ever read that combines real-life pirates, genealogy, the immigrant experience, law, Elizabethan history and art, an actual Irish historical mystery, ancestral spirits, spies, Nazis, parochial school trauma, Sherlock Holmes, the complexities of adult friendships, and the meaning of family?

In 1964, an inspirational high school teacher told his English class that a "pretty good writer" friend was willing to talk to us about what it meant to write. The "pretty good writer" was the Pulitzer Prize winning Irish-American novelist Edwin O'Connor, a force of nature. They made us all promise that someday each of us would write a novel. It took me more than fifty years, but better late than never. Fortunately, the sequel is moving much faster.

I live outside Boston, Massachusetts with my wife Dyan, an artist, retired art teacher, and documented direct descendant of a female pirate who appears in the novel.