A Sixth Sense

About the Book

What would you do to escape the grinding poverty of life in a Dublin slum in the 1930s? What chance do you have to break out of its debilitating and mind-numbing hold on you? Would you kill to survive? This is the dilemma facing Francis Reagan. He has a run-in with a paedophile priest whose subsequent murder unleashes for him a lifelong odyssey. Wherever he goes, he can’t find peace as his past continuously haunts him and further crimes entrap him. He trusts only his instincts-- his sixth sense-- which enable him to keep one step ahead of his pursuers, or does he? In order to escape the hangman in Ireland, Francis volunteers as an ambulance driver for the Republican Army in Spanish Civil War. He is recruited by the Germans and reconnoitres the poor air-raid defences in Belfast. A significant German bombing raid occurred in April 1941, when some 1,000 people lost their lives and thousands were displaced. Francis was devastated and blamed himself for the many city-wide deaths, particularly those of his close friends. A disillusioned Francis escapes from the clutches of the Abwehr and from a suspicious British military intelligence officer by moving to Britain’s Lake District. Francis finally finds a peaceful oasis as a Church of England vicar first in the racial cesspool that is Notting Dale, London, in the late 1950s, and then in quiet Branton, Devon. His first fifteen years there sees him at peace with his past, but his paranoia grows with the arrival in the village of the same intelligence officer who had been tasked to capture him during the war. Francis’s life finally begins to unravel. A series of murders leads the police to focus on the amiable vicar and his past.

About the Author

Alastair B. Davie is a retired corporate publicist living in Northbrook, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. He was born in England in1945, and lived in Windsor, England. He was educated in the United Kingdom at Langley School, Norfolk, and at the Institute of Marketing's College of Marketing. He was commissioned in the Royal Marines Commandos Reserve and served for seven years. He worked for the Financial Times and Reuters before moving to the United States in 1976. Over a 25-year career in the United States, he provided public relations, marketing communications and investor relations services for clients of leading public relations agencies and corporations. He retired in 2002 as director of corporate communications for Foster Wheeler Corporation, a Fortune 500 company. His retirement has enabled him to take up his first love of writing, particularly historical fiction of the twentieth century. He combines his fascination for history and his creative ability to weave an enthralling story so that the reader learns how historic events affected the ordinary person. A Sixth Sense is his first novel in is set initially in worn-torn Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. It follows the life of a young Irishman struggling to make a life for himself while avoiding the pitfalls of his past.