Fork in the Road A Novel

“Smart, gritty, and tough as a Brooklyn cop bar” “(New York Post),” Denis Hamill’s thrillers have won him a well-deserved cadre of fans. Now, in an electrifying departure, he unfurls a deeply moving tale of illfated love played out amid the romantic squalor and violent underpinnings of contemporary Dublin and New York — delivering a work of greater resonance than anything he has yet written.

Looking back, the passion that bloomed between Colin Coyne, young American filmmaker seeking aesthetic inspiration in Ireland, and Gina Furey, stunningly beautiful, iron-willed denizen of Dublin’s gypsy criminal underground, seemed as unlikely as it was overpowering. Colin had just crossed the Atlantic hoping to immerse himself in Ireland’s rich local color, experience a bit of the storied romance of his forebears’ homeland, and then return to New York having gained a greater sense of the country’s mythic and troubled cultural history. But before he knew what was happening, all of Colin’s bright-eyed hopes were realized, only too vividly — and at a cruel, life-altering price.

When Colin literally catches Gina red-handed as she picks his pocket in a hotel pub teeming with hard-edged locals, all it takes is one look into her dazzling eyes, and Colin falls hard. Purely for the sake of research — or so he tells himself — he hurtles headlong into the bewitching world of Gina Furey, and finds himself a star player in a Pygmalion-like relationship rich with dramatic film possibilities: the earnest Yankee auteur woos and wins the dangerous gypsy thief. But the tenuous lines separating art and reality soon dissolve, and the neatly linear screenplay unfolding inside Colin’s head is eclipsedby the brutal chaos and unpredictability of true life.

Imbuing every scene with a distinctive vibrancy and immediacy, Hamill employs a powerfully cinematic narrative style that is by turns devastating and hopeful, bittersweet and hilarious. “Fork in the Road” is both a tragic love story and the riveting drama of one man’s heartbreaking journey from exhilaration to desolation.