Death of a Cruise Ship
Published 1999. ISBN 0-908661-69-5
No longer in print. Available in most libraries.
Here is a truly remarkable story of mystery, suspense, acute danger and extraordinary courage – a modern shipwreck that could so easily have taken hundreds to their deaths.
In Death of a Cruise Ship, author Tom O’Connor presents a cross-section of the passengers, the entertainers and the crew as they move through a normal day ashore. Then when the worst kind of trouble occurs and the ship hits rocks, we follow these people through all their varied reactions and concerns, and sometimes desperate attempts to get free of the sinking ship.
The Irish Convict Series
True stories of several real Irishmen in the early 1800s are told through the adventures of the fictional Maurice O'Brien. After being convicted and transported to New South Wales, he escapes to New Zealand to carve out a new life with heathen savages and a new name. Hoping for peace and anonymity, he finds anything but. Maurice witnesses New Zealand’s pivotal moments as the Maori grapple with the arrival of Pakeha. When tensions rise over land, he must decide whose side is he on.
Maurice O’Brien is an Irish youth struggling with the mysteries of the transition from boyhood to manhood in Ireland in the 1830’s. Like most young men of the time he was bound to get into trouble with the church, his family and British authorities.
His new life as an Irish convict in the New South Wales penal colony was difficult than Maurice could have imagined. From a tiny well-ordered rural community in Ireland he was caged up with the roughest men in the British Isles for three months at sea.
When Maurice O’Brien reaches New Zealand he was a mutineer and an escaped convict. Surviving in the so-called land of heathen savages and cannibals would be as difficult and dangerous as New South Wales. He has to now settle in a new land.
In spite of the dangers of sailing small boats around Cook Strait and surviving a gunfight with one of the most ferocious musket armed tribes in New Zealand, Maurice O’Brien had made his home in this far flung new British colony.
