Amazon.com: The Quiet Woman eBook : Faherty, Terence: Books

Danny Furey, romance novelist is talked into taking a return journey to Ireland with her ill brother. Upon arriving she encounters a ghost, her ex-husband and a handsome Irish tour guide. They journey across Ireland to all the locations John Wayne's movie, The Quiet Man were filmed. In doing so they run across a character who is not all he seems. Thus leading them down an interesting path to discover who the ghost really is. The twists and turns kept me reading until the end. As I finished, I found myself smiling, thinking, this was a nice story, an interesting story quietly told. I imagine I would have enjoyed it more in some Irish pub, warmed by a fire with a glass of Irish whisky in hand.

I don’t think The Quiet Woman could’ve been written this well by anyone who wasn’t Irish by birth or descent. Terence Faherty understands the pleasures, the conflicts and the unfinished business of being Irish-American, which enables him to create characters who have a bone-bred love of Ireland’s countryside, as well as a yearning to uncover their own roots and connect in ways they can’t quite describe with the hardships their family endured there, before they faced the losses that came from moving on.The pull of the land and the people and the past propels the plot of The Quiet Woman - that, and Kerry Furey’s cancer, which makes him badger his estranged sister, Danny, into flying with him to Ireland to find their father’s family home. It doesn’t take great discernment to see that he hopes even more to suture their ruptured relationship before he runs out of time.The one bond Danny and Kerry still have may be shared by Terence Faherty (author of a much-loved mystery series set in Hollywood’s “Golden Age”) – a long standing obsession with The Quiet Man, which John Ford filmed in the fifties in Ireland with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. The search for the film’s locations provides much of the itinerary for the family tour.

Perfect. A mystery doesn't get any better than this.As a mystery writer myself, I'm a very critical reader -- haven't truly fallen for a book for ages -- and from the very beginning I fell in love with The Quiet Woman. The writing has the lightest touch -- superb -- and the portrayal of the characters is so subtle and real that you can't spot the bad guys because Faherty keeps revealing the depth of their humanity. Brilliant.The quest of the two American siblings, Kerry and Danielle Furey, landing in Ireland to track down their roots (at short notice because Kerry is ill) is a quirky take on the road trip with unexpected twists. Perhaps there's a slow patch a few chapters in, but the beauty of the prose carries you along, and then you're turning the pages again, wanting to know what really happened to the ghostly woman on that foggy road fifty years ago, but at the same time not wanting the writing to end. The links to the movie The Quiet Man, filmed in Ireland in the fifties, give the book its name and the quest a loose structure which works for both the protagonists and the reader. But fate keeps knocking the quest off course and taking the reader with it. Danielle Furey is a romance writer and the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter quoted from the Camelot Guide to Romance Writing are a delight, heralding the flavour of the action to follow and reflecting the subtle humour that pervades the pages.The two-star reviews are perplexing, and I'm guessing those readers like the wilder ride of popular fiction, but for me this book has everything I expect in a mystery novel -- gorgeous writing that like a ghost slips past you but leaves you changed, quirky but real characters full of both humanity and surprises, unpredictable twists that keep you turning the pages, existential musing that gives the story depth, and mystical elements in a mystery deeply embedded in its cultural setting.I buy ebooks on Kindle and if I love them I buy the tree-book. I'm about to buy The Quiet Woman in hardcover for my bookshelf. I'm full of the excitement of discovering a new author -- I've just downloaded the first mystery in Faherty's Owen Keane series. Bliss.