KEVIN NEAL, at the foot of the Blackstairs Mountains, fails to bait a P�ca to fight. In this compelling, heartrending, Irish coming-of-age story, he learns too well what it costs when monsters are unleashed.

Decades before the great famine, the youngest Neal boy survives the war but believes he has lost everyone. A stubborn persistence, a crumpled letter and the nurturing support of rural mountain folk enable him on his journey through his formative years. When he locates a childhood friend-Anastasia Kelly, he learns that she has become aloof and part of a different world. ANTY is as much a stranger to him as the tenants around an abbey by the seashore. The orphans try to hide from the past, but the violence encircling threatens what little they have left.

Can the orphans survive the wake of an Irish rebellion and the troubles unleashed? And, how does a boy fight a thing that tears apart the living and cuts through bone, without alerting a corrupt gentry and the sheriff's men?