The Garden of Martyrs

A Catholic parish is torn apart when two of its members are accused of murder

1806 is not a good time to be Catholic in Boston. When a man is brutally killed on the Boston Post Road, two unsuspecting Irishmen are charged with the crime. For five months they rot in prison, denied a lawyer until just two days before the hearing. It is a mockery of justice—a one-day trial that results in a unanimous verdict: The Irishmen will be hanged, dissected, and dismembered.
 
Comforting them falls to Father Cheverus, a French émigré struggling to adapt to life in the New World. It is his duty to help the condemned find peace, but any overture he makes to the prisoners will be met with an anti-Catholic backlash that could destroy his fledgling congregation. As he walks a fraught path, the priest must decide: Is his obligation to his flock, or to God?

“A stark, stunningly well-written first novel.” —The New York Times on A Brother’s Blood
 
“Brilliantly understated . . . This dazzling first novel deserves a place in all collections.” —Booklist on A Brother’s Blood
 
“[White’s] strength lies in his characters and his use of language to evoke the dark woods of rural Maine and the even darker lives of the people who spent the war years there.” —The Denver Post on A Brother’s Blood

Michael C. White is an author of mystery fiction. In 1996 he published A Brother’s Blood, about a German POW whose death in the waning days of World War II is investigated by his brother some five decades later. A critical success, it set the tone for White’s novels to follow: literary mysteries that often draw on forgotten pieces of history to address what it means to be human. He has written about the Civil War in Soul Catcher (2007) and the Russian side of World War II in Beautiful Assassin (2008).

When not writing, White teaches fiction workshops at Fairfield University and the University of Southern Maine. He lives and writes by a lake in Guilford, Connecticut.