Hoover's Children

In what is far more than a crime novel, Tony Irons briefly traces the wild gene in two of his three main characters, siblings Sean and Gwyneth O’Neal to 120 years earlier when ancestor Mary Donnegad O’Neal, a new Irish immigrant, decided to have sex with a Cherokee Indian, starting a group that came to be known as the Black Irish. That rebellious trait was passed from generation to generation until the mid 1960s when the country was struggling with the war in Vietnam and significant social upheaval. Through remarkable twists of misfortune, the O’Neal siblings were manipulated by the FBI into joining the hunt for a list of people that the underground Weatherman were recruiting for their own anti-government activities. Behind the intrigue was J. Edgar Hoover, therefore the title, “Hoover’s Children.” Sean became a Special Forces guy in Vietnam and then an enforcer for the mob in Boston. When his sister was raped, he extracted the ultimate revenge against her assailant. That was the murder that allowed Hoover to demand certain misdeeds from both Sean and Gwyneth. Also brought into the story was Jack Duncan, younger brother of Dwight who was serving time in prison for his idealistic resistance to the Vietnam War. Dwight and Jack were both brilliant students who spent a lot of time writing poetry, revealing a charisma that drew others to resistance against the war. Hoover knew that Dwight, with contacts to the Black Panthers in prison, was making brother Jack the unwitting courier of the list which Hoover wanted to get at all costs.

As the plot unfolded, Irons skillfully took us through Israel, Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey. He captured the drug, flower power and self-important intellectual culture of the era while spinning great plot twists that I didn’t see coming.

Author Tony Irons is a very interesting guy, and some of this story is autobiographical. He dropped out of college, became a carpenter, taught himself architecture, and was recognized by Mayor Willie Brown in 2000 as City Architect of San Francisco. It was only after a stint at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard that Irons turned to creative writing and produced this book, his debut novel. This novel was recommended to be by a guy in Todos Santos, Baja Sur, Mexico where I have been spending some time, and Tony Irons wrote in the acknowledgements section of his book that there’s a Todos Santos writers’ group. If this book gives a hint into the quality of writing that will come from this group, or even if it just the beginning of a series of books from Irons, we have a lot to look forward to.