Twenty-one-year-old Ciaran McGurk has just graduated from a Dublin university and is about to set off on the adventure of a lifetime. He's planning a move to London with a classmate in hopes of landing a job in journalism, ideally for a newspaper. Writing is the work he loves, though he fears that in an era of social networking, print journalism is fast becoming the dinosaur of career paths.

But a family emergency interrupts all his plans. Suddenly Cary finds himself back in his hometown, Glenkerry, in County Wicklow. There he reconnects with an old friend, Rosie O'Malley. Her story has always been a sad one, and now it seems history is repeating itself. Her mother has disappeared, and Rosie is desperate to locate her. And Rosie's father and brothers are her biggest obstacles. So she turns to her old friend, Cary McGurk, for help. But it's complicated, with a web of secrets, lies, and mystery entangling them.

Cary is torn?torn between starting a new life in London and plunging back into his old life in Glenkerry, a place full of sweet memories tinged with sorrow and regret. His head is telling him to move on, but will his heart listen?

ROSE OF GLENKERRY: A County Wicklow Mystery by Robert T. McMaster, Unquomonk Press, 2022. Both paperback and eBook editions are now available.

Robert T. McMaster grew up in Southbridge, Massachusetts. He completed his undergraduate education at Clark University, then earned graduate degrees from Boston College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. Early in his career he taught middle school science, then worked as an administrator for several environmental education organizations. After completing his graduate studies, he taught biology at Holyoke Community College in Holyoke, Massachusetts, for twenty years.

The nineteen-teens have long interested Robert McMaster. He found inspiration in his parents' reminiscences of growing up in that era, particularly his father's stories of riding the streetcars that plied city streets and country roads in those days. Those stories led to his first novel, Trolley Days, published in 2012, then The Dyeing Room (2013), Noah's Raven (2017), and Darkest Before Dawn (2022). The series follows the lives of four young people growing up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the tumultuous World War I era (www.TrolleyDays.net).

Robert McMaster's fascination with Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864), renowned American geologist and paleontologist, began when he visited the Pratt Museum of Natural History at Amherst College over half a century ago. In 2014, while doing research for one of his novels, he discovered to his great surprise that there had never been a biography written of Hitchcock. In 2021 he published All the Light Here Comes from Above: The Life and Legacy of Edward Hitchcock. More than a century-and-a-half after his death, the story of one of nineteenth-century America's most influential scientists at last had been told (www.EdwardHitchcock.com).

The author's ancestral ties to Ireland led him to undertake another project, the County Wicklow Mystery Series including Rose of Glenkerry and Fugitive from Injustice, stories of mystery and romance set against the stunning backdrop of Ireland's County Wicklow (www.WicklowMysteries.com).