The South Lawn Plot

A global thriller with a plot straight out of international headlines...from a newspaper man with history and politics in his veins

Nick Bailey considers himself a hardboiled reporter for London's hungriest tabloid. But even Bailey is left reaching for answers when he gets a midnight assignment to investigate a body hanging from the infamous Blackfriars Bridge. Someone, it seems, is killing priests. It's the latest twist in a deadly conspiracy, centuries in the making, that will reach all the way to the South Lawn of the White House.

In this tale of intrigue and bitter religious rivalry, Ray O'Hanlon sets a conflict, one that has simmered for four hundred years, on a collision course with an American President and a British Prime Minster who are battling a present day crisis that threatens global peace. Both world leaders are confronting an uncertain future. But it's what is coming at them from the distant past that poses the greatest danger, a threat to their very lives.

"The South Lawn Plot has everything a good thriller could want - duplicitous politicians and secretive priests, a body dangling under Blackfriars Bridge, and a canny reporter who thinks he has seen it all, but hasn't. A splendid page-turner."

-Benjamin Black, New York Times bestselling author of Christine Falls and Elegy for April

"Ray O'Hanlon has given us a marvelous novel, with a layered, hard-driving narrative, vivid characters, abiding mysteries, and the past that has not passed. This is wonderful work."

-Pete Hamill, bestselling author of Forever and North River

Ray O'Hanlon is editor of The Irish Echo, the USA's most widely read Irish American newspaper, based in New York. Over the course of a distinguished career in journalism spanning more than thirty years, he has reported from three continents and has appeared on "CBS' 60 Minutes," "BBC World News," "ABC World News Tonight" and "PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."