Unsanctioned

Two men, one ordinary, the other among the wealthiest in the world, share a terrible fate: the loss of the loves of their lives. The same day. One of them, the apparently ordinary one, is anything but ordinary-he harbors a dark secret. Harry Shaughnessy never imagines this could happen to him, again. But on what promises to be the best day of his life, the day he is to become president of the company where he has worked over thirty years, the girl of his dreams, his wife of thirty-one years, Jenny, becomes a collateral victim during a Baltimore bank robbery. Police identify the members of the gang, but there isn't enough evidence to bring them to trial. If they are to face justice, Harry must commit acts he thought long buried, buried with the boy's name he once carried, a boy whose existence had come to seem a fantasy. Twenty-three hundred miles distant, as Jenny's life ebbs from her body on the cold marble of a bank lobby floor, Mary Winthrop's body is violently scattered over a square block. Her death is a mistake-the bomb intended for a South American judge who traveled to Phoenix to receive praise for putting away major narcotics traffickers. Again police identify those responsible but cannot bring about justice. The high and mighty Stanford Winthrop III burns for revenge, but he is not prepared to exact it himself. For all of his accomplishments, he is not made of the right stuff to wreak vengeance by his own hand. Winthrop offers Harry intelligence and financial assistance in his efforts to avenge Jenny's murder. In return, if Harry survives his quest, Winthrop wants Harry to kill the drug dealer responsible for Mary's death. There is more to Winthrop's proposition. He wants to enter into a sort of partnership with Harry, a very unequal partnership, to avenge the deaths of others for whom justice is elusive-the targets to be selected by Winthrop alone. Harry Shaughnessy, the boy who dealt out death during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the boy who gained a new home at the age of fourteen in the United States with a parish priest for a guardian, the boy who grew to become a good man-Jenny's good man- reverts to his former self. But not entirely. Throughout his quest for vengeance, he unconsciously searches for love again. And he finds it not once, but twice, only to lose the first and nearly the second. And his own life. His unsanctioned actions come at a terrible price, a price only Moses might understand.