The Janus Web

Description

A hotel is bombed in Belfast. An Italian statesman, Aldo Moro, is kidnapped in Rome. The connection between two such widely separated events is the IRA’s expert on improvised explosive devices, Tony Keegan. Keegan, the presumed bomber of the Belfast hotel, was on his way to Rome to meet members of the Red Brigades, the presumed kidnappers of Aldo Moro, when he is captured by British agents and held incommunicado in London. MI6 sees a chance to help the Italian secret service: send an agent to Rome to infiltrate the Red Brigades by pretending to be Tony Keegan. Enter Ross Macrory. He had earlier worked in the Rome station for three years; he knows the city, speaks Italian, and more importantly he has an Ulster accent. What appears to be a standard mission for Macrory turns perilous when he finds himself in a Red Brigades ‘safe house’ in Rome, surrounded by potentially dangerous Janus characters, playing double roles. Whom can he trust? The wealthy Italian entrepreneur, the unconventional communist handyman, the agent from the Italian secret service, the English travel agent, the enigmatic young Irish-Italian woman who sat beside him on the plane from Belfast and turns up in the Red Brigades safe house as a guest of the wealthy entrepreneur. Alone in a terrorist stronghold, with no allies he can be sure of, Macrory’s mission veers off in a perilous direction different from that in which it had been planned to go. He finds himself entangled in a widening web of duplicity and international intrigue whose strands extend far beyond the borders of Italy, caught up in the turmoil of the ‘Years of Lead.’ (275 words)

About Ron Duffy

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Ron Duffy spent three years “on the road”, mostly by bicycle, travelling extensively in both western and eastern Europe, with “working sojourns” in Norway, Austria and England. HisMy adventuring over, he settled down to studies, and obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast. He then emigrated to Canada, took an MSc in Biogeography at the University of Calgary and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in geography.Duffy’s writing career began when he started publishing mostly travel and history articles in numerous Irish, British and Canadian newspapers and magazines. In 1988 McGill-Queen’s University Press published his non-fiction book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War which was based on his PhD thesis. In 1988 his play, Hearts and Minds, won first prize in the novice section of the annual Alberta Playwriting Competition. Another play, Loved and Left, was given a staged reading by Theatre 80 in Calgary.Retired from lecturing, Duffy turned to writing full-time. In the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition in 2012 his novel Crossed Lives was a nominee, and his historical novel O’Hanlon received an Honourable Mention. He has also written a trilogy of Irish novels, The Unquiet Land, In Turbulent Times, and A Further Shore, since published independently in one volume, and a World War Two novel Brandt. As a companion volume to the Ulster trilogy he wrote Until The Troubles Started: A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland.