Fair Haven [Paperback]

Chapter One

A Wild Rover

Castlelough, Ireland

There were those in the village who claimed that Michael Joyce must be mad. What else, they asked, could make a man leave the green fields of Ireland to risk life and limb all over the world?

Besides, Mrs. Sheehan, proprietor of Sheehan and Sons Victualers, had told him just last week after he'd sold her husband a dressed hog destined for bacon and chops, if it was trouble you were seeking, Michael James Joyce, you needn't have gone farther than just across your own country's borders.

Aye, it's a good point you're making, Mrs. Sheehan, he'd replied through his teeth.

Despite some less-than-subtle coaxing from locals -- and wasn't the butcher's wife the worst of them? -- Michael never talked about those risk-filled years he'd spent in places where the voices of sanity had gone first hoarse, then mute. Nor had he discussed the incident that had nearly succeeded in getting him killed. Not even with his family, and certainly not with one of the biggest gossips in all of Castlelough.

Still, there were times he was willing to admit -- if only to himself -- that perhaps those who questioned his mental state might have a point. He may well have been touched with a bit of madness as he'd traveled from war zone to war zone throughout the world. Given an up-close and personal view of man's inhumanity toward man through the lenses of his cameras, Michael had begun to wonder if insanity was contagious.

Despite having grown up in a large, loving family, he'd long ago decided against bringing a child into a crazed world where innocent people could be blown up by terrorists in a Derry railway station or burned out of their homes and murdered by a political policy gone amok called ethnic cleansing.

Whatever part of him had stupidly believed he could make a difference in the world had been blown out of him, and now, like the prodigal son in his grandmother ls’