Wolves of Eden

“Kevin McCarthy is in the company of masters like Patrick O’Brian and Hilary Mantel.… [A] shiningly humane novel.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and A Friend of Mr. Lincoln


1866, Dakota Territory. Red Cloud’s coalition of tribes is battling the U.S. Army to reclaim hunting grounds in the Powder River Valley. Against this background, Wolves of Eden sets four men on a deadly collision course in a narrative that explores the cruelty of warfare, the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit. Lieutenant Martin Molloy and his loyal orderly are sent west to investigate a triple murder at a frontier fort, and Irish immigrant brothers Thomas and Michael O’Driscoll, who survived the brutal frontlines of the Civil War, find themselves as both hunters and the hunted in another bloody campaign. Blending intimate historical detail and emotional acuity, Wolves of Eden is “a riveting and propulsive mystery” (Publishers Weekly).




Genre: Historical

"When it comes to saturation-level historical authenticity - the sense of being there, alive and at large in the vanished past - I think Kevin McCarthy is in the company of masters like Patrick O’Brian and Hilary Mantel. Wolves of Eden is also a shiningly humane novel, all the more credible for being told by an Irish author, about the immigrant soldiers who found themselves on the front lines during the harrowing seizure of the American West." - Stephen Harrigan

"Kevin McCarthy is a fresh voice, and a keen one. This Irish thriller writer has ventured boldly into a new continent and a new history. His place is the American West in the 1860s, when the long, sad carnage was winding its grim way toward Wounded Knee. With this story of profound tragedy, his new readers will be many." - Larry McMurtry

"Kevin McCarthy shows himself to be an inspired explorer of history’s lost and forgotten causes. Wolves of Eden is a war story, mystery and elegy?thrilling, unflinching and finely observed." - Ed O'Loughlin