CONNECTIONS

A century-old secret revealed

A sexual crime uncovered

A reputation restored

A romance ignited

Tommy Walsh in Ireland and Anna Novak in Pennsylvania are brought together online when documenting their respective family trees.

Anna’s great grandfather, Charles Novak, and his brother Leo fled from Poland to America in the late 1890s and settled in Philadelphia, experiencing contrasting lives and lifestyles.

While working together to research the lives of their immigrant relations in America over 100 years ago, Tommy and Anna uncover the attempted assassination of a bishop in Philadelphia in 1912, leading to evidence of a sexual assault, of deceit and neglect and the restoration of Leo Novak’s reputation.

These revelations had a devastating effect on both families but for very different reasons.

Will Tommy and Anna be able to continue to build their growing relationship despite those revelations or will the actions of their ancestors continue to reverberate?

Author – Patrick A Ryan

Patrick Ryan was born in Thurles, County Tipperary and lives in Dublin.  When researching his own family tree he experienced the scarcity of online records and the confusion caused by having so many families with the name Ryan in his local area.
In newspaper archives he discovered an event in America in the 19th century which came as a complete surprise to his extended family who questioned how it could be possible that such information had not been passed down to them.
This event and the reaction to it was the inspiration for this novel.