The Reluctant Rapparee

1743 County Downe Ireland. Shane McGrogan, the son of a farmer evicted from his land, has taken to the road as an outlaw fighting a guerrilla war against tyranny and oppression. He has recruited a small band of disparate outcasts ranging from hardened criminals to traumatised famine survivors. McGrogan hopes to fashion the band into an elite fighting unit, but when they botch a relatively simple ambush and are chased into a haunted wood by an angry militia, their mission becomes a matter of survival. Archie McClung fell into being a rapparee due to his own peculiar circumstances; it is not the life that he would have hoped for. McGrogan aspires to fight for the common good, but McClung dreams of making a better life for himself. Cast into an extraordinary landscape where the physical world overlaps with the realm of spirits, the rapparees dare not trust their own senses let alone one another. Why has Shane risked everything by ambushing a guarded passenger coach? What amongst their ragged stash of recently pilfered possessions is stirring their enemies to hunt the rapparees so voraciously? Who is the mysterious Frenchman in their midst? And who will be the first to cut and run?

WRITER Jim McComish has a passion for history, ancestry and a love of fiction. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the Belfast man put it down on paper. The Reluctant Rapparee is Jim's first novel in this genre.