Kitchen Canary is a novel about the power of greed, the toll of guilt and shame, and rewards of reconciliation. At the insistence of her parents, sixteen-year-old Katie O'Neil reluctantly left her beloved Galway.

She joined her cousin, Moira Murphy, in Boston, Massachusetts to work as a nanny and domestic. In mid-nineteenth century Boston, Irish domestics were often referred to as Kitchen Canaries and considered property of their employers. As immigrants to America, the young women encounter rejection, fear, and humiliation. Their lives become entangled in the secrets and lies of their employers at 2102 Beacon Street.

In four short years, Katie and Moira experience violation, despair, love, and acceptance. In this post-Civil War era, Boston is bustling with change as wealthy Englishmen and Boston Brahmins expand world trade routes, build railroads and develop land. Immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Poland establish neighborhoods, existing in overcrowded, disease-ridden shacks and tenements. They and negroes flocking North, suffer hate, humiliation and rejection from the establishment.

The only value they have to the rich Bostonians is their willingness to work for little money performing menial or back-breaking, dangerous jobs on the docks, and building railroads. This story is about the goodness of others, black, white, Irish and English whose strength prevails to overcome evil and guide Katie and Moira to true redemption.