In the Wake of Maureen Reilly

About the Book

The principal characters reveal themselves in their brushes with everyday living - friendship, sexuality, passion, loss, loneliness and a melancholy that seems derived from family and Maureen's death - all of them forces that signify the power of past deeds to justify present behaviors. It is a story driven more by character revelation than by plot.

The story of the Reilly family begins in Dublin, Ireland, and introduces sketches that trace the character of Maureen Reilly throughout a determined adolescence and a disastrous marriage. When she recovers she marries Jack Francis, and moves to a small town in Ontario, Canada, where she lives out her brief life.

Twenty years after her death, her daughter Jacqueline experiences a psychotic episode that makes her the central character in a psychiatric treatment that in turn involves uncle Max Reilly, and father Jack Francis. Flash backs, triggered by psychiatrist Michael Regan, and his colleague Jodi Heatherington, challenged this family's accomodations to living, and helps to peel back layers of haunting memories of how life was, how each got to be the way they are.

The minor characters in the story offer either comic relief, or life's darker side, all of them susceptible to failed experiments in their efforts to be appreciated if not loved. It is therefore a redemptive story of ordinary people who confront their personal ghosts with heart and humor.

About the Author

Psychotherapist and University Professor -- retired. Author of The Child Within: A Powerful Therapeutic Ally and Witch Hunting in the Nineties. In the Wake of Maureen Reilly is his first novel. He and Anne Marie live on the north shore of Lake Erie.