Dark Night of the Soul

In this final volume of the Brigid O’Meara trilogy, the heroine, a beautiful Irish music hall dancer/singer who was drawn into gun smuggling during the 1895 Jameson Raid against Kruger’s Boer Republic, and was incarcerated in a British concentration camp when she sided with the Boers during the Anglo Boer War, marries Willie Gray, the British Uitlander and revolutionary who she fell in love with during the turbulent period building up to the war. Now, in the aftermath of the war, Brigid undergoes a cathartic journey where she is forced to confront the demons of the past that she has kept bottled up inside her... the abortion she underwent after being raped by a diamond miner in Kimberley, the killing of him in an act of self defence when he pursues her and murders her fiancé, together with the 18 months of trauma she and her young son were subjected to in the concentration camp.

The dark world she is projected into is a harsh one, far removed from the comfortable life she has created with Willie and her son Ritchie, but it is also a world that gives insights into the hypocritical social morals and sanctimonious self-righteousness of the new ruling British colonials. It is a world which gives Brigid the freedom to take revenge on past enemies, but also one in which she has to face retribution for actions that have sunk her into a deep abyss from which there seems no escape.