Richard O'Rawe Knihy

An inside account of the H-Blocks hunger strike of the early 1980s.

By July 1981 four republican hunger strikers had already died in Long Kesh Prison. A fifth, Joe McDonnell, was clinging to life. To outsiders, Margaret Thatcher appeared unbending; yet, far from the prying eyes of the press, her government was making a substantial offer to the prisoners. This book is a sequel to the bestseller Blanketmen.

In Ricky O’Rawe’s stunning debut novel, as audacious and well executed as Ructions’ plan to rob the National Bank itself, a new voice in Irish fiction has been unleashed that will shock, surprise and thrill as he takes you on a white-knuckle ride through Belfast’s criminal underbelly. Enter the deadly world of tiger kidnappings, kangaroo courts, money laundering, drug deals and double-crosses.Northern Heist is a roller-coaster bank robbery thriller with twists and turns from beginning to end.

"This book is a tour de force . a chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit over extreme adversity. It is a story of hope. It is the story of a man I loved and would have taken a bullet for." --Johnny Depp ***An electrified young man, with eyes wild and a clenched fist, bursts out of the Old Bailey and declares his innocence to the world. Gerry Conlon has just won his appeal for the 1974 Guildford pub bombing. After fifteen years in prison, freedom beckons. Or does it? Following his release, Conlon received close to one million pounds from government compensation, movie and book deals; he ran in the same circles as Johnny Depp, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Shane MacGowan. Conlon seemed to have it all. Yet within five years he was hooked on crack cocaine and eating out of bins in the backstreets of London. Beyond the elation of his release was the awful descent into addiction, isolation and self-loathing. But this is a book about the resilience of the human spirit. What emerges from the darkness and the addiction is Gerry Conlon the pacifist; the man who came to be recognised around the world as a campaigner against miscarriages of justice. In the Name of the Son also reveals damning new evidence of statement tampering by the authorities which would've cleared Conlon at the initial trial. Life-long friend, Richard O'Rawe, has written a powerful and candid story of Gerry Conlon's extraordinary life following his years of brutal incarceration at the hands of the British justice system. [Subject: Irish Studies, British Studies, Biography, History, Criminal Justice]

Freddie Scappaticci was born in 1946 and raised in a deeply nationalist area of Belfast. When the Troubles broke out in 1969, he joined the Provisional IRA, where he quickly rose through the ranks, becoming commander of Belfast in 1984.From the outside, Scappaticci appeared to be a dedicated volunteer, but inwardly, he had become disenchanted with the IRA and, in 1977, he started working for British intelligence. At the same time, he took up a leading role in a newly formed IRA Internal Security Unit (ISU), aka ' The Nutting Squad' . He personally executed two suspected informers and condemned at least thirty-seven more to death.Was he the serial killer that history portrays him? Undoubtedly. But it' s not that simple, because every time he passed the death penalty on an informer, he told his British intelligence handlers about the intended execution, giving them the opportunity to prevent the killing.Did the tasking and co-ordinating group, the primary British intelligence organisation in Northern Ireland during the troubles, aid and abet the IRA in the mass-murder of British citizens? That is the question Richard O' Rawe poses in Stakeknife' s Dirty War.

Stumbling on a piece of Nazi memorabilia once owned by Goering, bank robber Ructions O'Hare looks into rumors that plundered Nazi gold might actually be hidden in Ireland and races to find it before his adversaries