Mount Olivet
The Rising
The successful CEO of Hennessey Construction Company since 1968, John Riley is working mightily through the re-structuring of Hennessey’s real estate subsidiary, Hennessey Land Company. In this, his daughter Brigit’s success as head of Hennessey Land has brought him into a world of billion-dollar real estate deals, and Keith Pierson, an international developer whose eyes have turned to Hennessey’s properties in the Greater Washington DC market.
This is John’s first encounter with the really Big Money, up close and personal. Having built Hennessey Construction into a regionally recognized player, he finds himself drawn past his world of building buildings to an emerging sense and discovery of place and purpose in Washington, DC. Most immediate in this has become keeping Keith Pierson out of the neighborhood, in particular denying him ownership of the Hay Adams Hotel, directly across Lafayette Square from the White House.
Others in the story include John’s bother, Michael, a K Street lawyer of stature and presence with flash backs to his secret life with an IRA terrorist and a lost son. Following her reconciliation with her mother Mary in St. Patrick’s Day, John’s sister, Mary Kate, has since married a New York physician and holocaust survivor. She is now desperate with the prospect of their only son joining the Israeli army. And despite Brigit’s success in real estate, she is in critical need of a deeper life and is working Hennessey Land’s restructuring to find it.
And through it all, Mary Riley, 91, emerges as a moral center, a compass for all. It is her common sense - and the courage to speak it - that strengthens the others in seeing the right and reaching for it as best they all can.
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The Swampoodle Trilogy tracks and speaks to the Irish in America. Out of the famine and into the history of the place, it is the Irish as integral to the continuing creation and reality of the American phenomenon itself, its purpose and validation.
“From a place of oppression and want,
we came to a land of freedom and plenty,
and we made it better.
Note: The books of the Trilogy underwent a refresh on the August 2020 launch of the new website. It is recommended that purchases be made from Amazon new stocks only.
