I've always loved old graveyards. That's why the protagonist of my Sweeney St. George mystery series is an art historian specializing in funerary art and gravestone iconography. Like me, Sweeney finds cemeteries beautiful, intriguing, peaceful, melancholy, and . . . full of stories. Everywhere you turn in a graveyard you can find a story, or part of one. Who was Belinda? Besides the wife of Arad Evans, that is? Graveyards are full of questions and mysteries. On the slate and granite and marble faces of gravestones, you can also see the evolving attitudes towards death of the people who would visit them and then be buried beneath them. The urn and willow trees on this slate stone from the ear
WHAT IF . . ? The Expeditioners series started with a series of What-Ifs? What if the computers all crashed and it was discovered that the maps of the world were all wrong? What if there were new places to explore, places not on the official maps of the world? What if a 13-year-old boy, the son of a famous explorer who had disappeared while on an expedition, came into possession of half of a mysterious map? The Expeditioners series is my answer to these questions and more! Find more information about the books here! Buy the books here! The Expeditioners and the Secret of Drowned Man's Canyon Computers have failed, electricity is extinct, and the race to discover new lands is underway! In thi
Last week, I got to tell a story about Grace O'Malley (or Gráinne Mhaol, or Graunuile,) the Sea Queen (or Pirate Queen) of Connacht to a group of friends and strangers, and to play some Irish music on my cello. It was a wonderful night and a culmination of sorts for me. I lived in Dublin in the 1990s and got my Masters degree in Irish Literature at Trinity College. Ever since I returned home, I've experienced a need to regularly "Scratch my Irish," as I've come to think of it. I scratch it in various ways -- through my writing, my reading, through travel, through music, through film. A year or so ago, I started taking Irish language lessons and playing the cello, with a secret, embarrassed w
