With rivalries rekindled and the brothers Knight digging into the university's past, Sham Rock, the latest in Ralph McInerny's well-loved mystery series, is as witty and charming as ever. The University of Notre Dame relies on Roger Knight, the rotund professor of Catholic Studies, and his brother Philip, a semiretired PI, to investigate certain delicate situations that could put the school in a bad light. Students, faculty, and alumni, like David Williams, are all fair game. Having been a successful financial adviser until recently, David has returned to campus to renege on a pledged donation to the university's ethics program. While he's there, one of his former classmates sends a letter confessing to the murder and a secret burial of one of their closest friends, a student who had gone missing decades before and was never found. As students, David, Patrick, and Timothy made up the "Trinity," an irreverent nickname for three close friends and fierce rivals---be it for on-campus prestige or the affections of a beautiful St. Mary's student from across the road. Ready to help the school put the whole sordid tragedy behind them, Roger and Philip set about the sad task of unearthing Timothy's body, only to find that they have a much bigger mystery with which to contend.

Kinsale, Ireland, in a future time is emerging from the rigors of climate change when a beautiful girl is found stabbed and washed up in Scilly near Bob Foley’s family home, Sham Rock. Bob is a retired US Navy commander whose old friend, Declan McGuinness of the Gardai, is assigned to investigate the murder. Inspector McGuinness’s search takes him to the yacht of a billionaire, Conrad Mercer, who found a way to take advantage of climate change. He employs “Meatface” Henson as his security officer and fixer, a man with a drugs record and, as it turns out, a strange interest in the ancestry of Bob Foley. McGuinness is assisted by Garda Brenda Flaherty, who holds Mercer and Henson responsible for the death of her Army Ranger husband years earlier. She agrees to go undercover to gather evidence, barely escaping a dangerous encounter. The adventure takes Declan and Brenda to the Libyan desert, following the kidnapping and strange rescue of Bob Foley’s son, and eventually to France where the international chase continues. Finally, a double engagement in Kinsale and a strange twist on the ancestry of Declan’s old friend ends the story.

When the pot of green shamrocks that Rabbit has been growing for St. Patrick's Day goes missing, he asks all the other animals if they have seen it.

Shamrock Tea is an Irish drug that enables its users to see things not given to ordinary mortals. They can sense colours and sounds more vividly; they can penetrate the surface of paintings; they can cross time. The narrator, his cousin and a strange Belgian friend know that their lives are ruled mysteriously by the great van Eyck painting, The Arnolfini Portrait, and they have travelled in dream like moments through the painting into other times. They discover that each moment is connected to every other. But in the strange world of Shamrock Tea, no story can be straightforward. With a cast of characters that includes the gardener Ludwig Wittgenstein, this book will blow your mind.

In The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism, Eileen P. Sullivan traces changes in nineteenth-century American Catholic culture through a study of Catholic popular literature. Analyzing more than thirty novels spanning the period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Sullivan elucidates the ways in which Irish immigration, which transformed the American Catholic population and its institutions, also changed what it meant to be a Catholic in America. In the 1830s and 1840s, most Catholic fiction was written by American-born converts from Protestant denominations; after 1850, most was written by Irish immigrants or their children, who created characters and plots that mirrored immigrants’ lives. The post-1850 novelists portrayed Catholics as a community of people bound together by shared ethnicity, ritual, and loyalty to their priests rather than by shared theological or moral beliefs. Their novels focused on poor and working-class characters; the reasons they left their homeland; how they fared in the American job market; and where they stood on issues such as slavery, abolition, and women’s rights. In developing their plots, these later novelists took positions on capitalism and on race and gender, providing the first alternative to the reigning domestic ideal of women. Far more conscious of American anti-Catholicism than the earlier Catholic novelists, they stressed the dangers of assimilation and the importance of separate institutions supporting a separate culture. Given the influence of the Irish in church institutions, the type of Catholicism they favored became the gold standard for all American Catholics, shaping their consciousness until well into the next century.

The Shamrock and Peach is a unique book in many ways. It is a cookbook that explores the best of Ulster-Scots cuisine but is also the tale of an immigrant's journey, following in the footsteps of those Scots-Irish settlers who forged the trails of Appalachia years ago. It is a story of the many cultural overlaps that exist between the North of Ireland and the Deep South, celebrating those cultural expressions through the language of really good food. The first half of the book is set in the green fields of Ireland from where we cross the ocean to the American South to discover some wonderful food experiences that have their roots in the Emerald Isle. Filled with beautiful photographs of both regions, this cookbook will be a fun and interesting resource to browse through and use in your kitchen for years to come.

Secret Service agent John Mavio infiltrates the infamous Hell's Kitchen in New York to shut down a ring of organized crime leaders in an elaborate counterfeit money operation, perhaps the worst in history.--From publisher's description.