Man In The Shadows

In 1867, three British colonies became the four provinces of the new Dominion of Canada. Among the Fathers of Confederation was D'Arcy McGee, a fiery former Irish nationalist and friend of John A. Macdonald. As the fledgling country was forming, its security was threatened by the Fenian Brotherhood, a group of Irish republicans that advocated a forcible takeover of Canada by the United States.

In this historical novel, Gordon Henderson imagines a cross-border plot to assassinate key Canadian political figures-with complicity at the highest levels of the U.S. government-in an attempt to destabilize the new country. We follow the fictional Conor O'Dea, a young Irish Catholic with political aspirations, who is the assistant to D'Arcy McGee. O'Dea becomes romantically involved with a young Protestant woman, which provokes upset and violence. When McGee is assassinated by a Fenian sympathizer-or so everyone believes-O'Dea takes it upon himself to discover the real assassin, and to prevent the prime minister of Canada, Sir John himself, from being the next victim.

GORDON HENDERSON is a television documentary producer whose company, 90th Parallel Productions, specializes in history, science and documentaries with social impact. He has worked as a parliamentary correspondent, has produced network current affairs programming and was a senior series producer on the CBC/Radio-Canada series Canada: A People’s History. For more than a decade, he was an instructor with the journalism department at Toronto’s Ryerson University. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Pam. They have three grown children.