Pay the Devil

In his first paperback for HarperCollins, master storyteller Jack Higgins displays all his customary skills in a heart-pounding adventure with a less familiar setting – 19th-century rural Ireland – and featuring a swashbuckling new hero.

At the end of the American Civil War, Confederate Colonel Clay Fitzgerald escapes to Ireland, where his uncle has left him an estate, only to find that Ireland is caught up in a civil war of its own. The struggle between the wealthy landlords and the impoverished tenant farmers is growing in intensity, and having just fought and lost a terrible war, Clay wants to avoid the coming conflict. But after witnessing the atrocities that the landowners visit upon the people, Clay is unable to stand by. Taking the guise of a legendary night-riding outlaw, he joins the fight against the landlords – and wages a rebellion of his own…

Reviews

‘Higgins is the master.’
TOM CLANCY

‘A compulsively readable storyteller.’
Sunday Express

‘Higgins makes the pages fly.’
New York Daily News

‘Higgins is a master of his craft.’
Daily Telegraph

About the author

Jack Higgins lived in Belfast till the age of twelve. Leaving school at fifteen, he spent three years with the Royal Horse Guards, and was later a teacher and university lecturer. His thirty-sixth novel, The Eagle Has Landed (1975), turned him into an international bestselling author, and his novels have since sold over 250 million copies and been translated into sixty languages. Many have been made into successful films. He died in 2022, at his home in Jersey, surrounded by his family.