The Salted Furrows of Mercy
A Novel of Two Timelines

About this book:

In the summer of 1847, the potato blight didn't just arrive on the wind over the Clogher Valley—it arrived in barrels, hauled up mountain tracks under armed guard and sprayed onto the fields by men in Ministry uniforms. Thomas Devlin watched his crop dissolve into yellow crystalline sludge, smelled copper in the soil, and knew the hunger coming for his family was no act of God. A century later, archivist Clare Devlin uncovers the ledger entries that prove it: signed requisitions for vitriol and copper sulfate, confidentiality clauses for nighttime deliveries, a marginal note in Captain Vance's own hand—*Crop response as anticipated. Yield ruined. Tenancy clearance scheduled.* The famine was a weapon. The blight was the cover story.

Now, in the long shadow of the spruce plantation that swallowed her great-great-grandfather's farm, Clare digs into earth that has not forgotten. The soil still burns with the chemistry of 1847; the runoff still poisons the streams. And Richard Vance—heir to the estate, keeper of the archives, guardian of the lie—is waiting on the ridge, watching her dig. He knows what she holds in her specimen jars: not just evidence of a century-old crime, but the key to every title deed in the valley. As the two timelines converge in the poisoned furrows of Blackwood Farm, Clare must decide how far she'll go to exhume a truth the state buried deep—and whether the mercy of rain can ever wash clean what was salted by design.

Atmospheric, razor-sharp, and rooted in a buried history that echoes into the present, *The Salted Furrows of Mercy* is a literary thriller that asks what happens when the ground beneath your feet remembers what the law has forbidden you to speak.