Worse Things Than Dying: A Fr John Winter Novel

Worse things than dying: A Fr John Winter novel
If you had the power, would you kill your present child to create a better, healthier one?
If you had the power, would you help an old friend and a tortured young man, even at the risk of destroying your own health?
If you had the power, would you take a loved one from their resting place in the grave, if there was a chance you could breathe new life into them?
Where would you stop? How far would you go?
‘Worse things than dying a Fr John Winter novel,’ follows a retired priest, a high-powered cardinal, a demented scientist, a tormented businessman and two disabled lovers who have found love with each other, as they confront these issues and struggle with the most basic of all questions, what does ‘human’ mean anymore?

Bleakmount Parish, Mid-Roscommon 1854-1880; and Athlone and Philadelphia and Virginia, 1984 Ireland.
Living under the shadow of his famous uncle, now a cardinal in Philadelphia, forty-eight-year-old Fr John Winter, by contrast, is burnt out. A failed Catholic priest back living in Athlone where his career started in the 1960s. Now it is 1984. He is older, disillusioned, and utterly exhausted. He spends his evenings in the Royal Hoey hotel in the centre of town, propping up the bar, drinking pints of stout and whiskey chasers. It is December, the days are gloomy and short, it is coming near Christmas. Three months previously, Winter returned from his last posting in Adamsdown and Splott, a working-class area of South Glamorgan in Cardiff down on its luck, blighted by unemployment. His last deed there was to use his psychic gift to help unearth a murder in the basement of an old house on Comet Street that took place several decades earlier. But this very gift is what has exhausted him. He wants no more of, as one person described him, being an occult bloodhound.
Now living in the quiet cul-de-sac of Maple Lane in the town's West Bank, with his loyal housekeeper Mary McLaughlin, who knew him before he left for several postings abroad over twenty years ago, things do not get easier.
They get much more complicated in fact.
His uncle has written to him from Philadelphia. The letter begins, ‘John, if you’re reading this, I might be missing, or dead.’ Winter knows that his uncle runs a secret organisation in the US, determined to stop advances in human eugenics, or genetic engineering, led by one man: rabid eugenicist Dr Eugene Marks.
Through Philip Franks, an old friend of his, Winter meets Samantha Clarke. Franks is an accountant; a cautious man. He knows all the good Winter achieved before leaving Athlone all those years ago as a young, energetic gifted priest. Franks hates to see him descend into the arms of drink. Soon after being introduced to her by Franks, Winter begins a romantic relationship with a thirty-seven-year-old widow. They soon become lovers.
Winter's plan to live a quiet life is further shaken when he receives a letter from an old friend. The friend is Fr Michael Gallagher, formerly a high-flying priest in Birmingham. But Gallagher got into trouble when he had an affair with the wife of one of his major benefactors, a millionaire building contractor. For his penance—and his safety—Gallagher is banished to Bleakmount, a poor, isolated parish in Mid-Roscommon. A place whose inhabitants DNA is still traumatized by the memory of the misery and terror of the famine years and the subsequent land war era.
Gallagher has witnessed Winter use his psychic gift and wants him to use it again to help a parishioner of his. Bankrupt hotelier Ted Ward has moved with his wife Lillian and son David into an old famine cottage on a poor plot of land that he bought years earlier to keep a few horses on. He never envisioned that he would someday have to call it home. Nor did he take into account what secrets and terrors the old cottage might hold.
‘Fr Winter’ is an intoxicating mix of love, lust, hate, and the desire for prestige. In other words, what makes us human.