Reputations: Australian Historical Fiction (The Australian Sandstone Series Book 7)

When your best friend becomes your worst enemy, how much can one man lose before he stops being himself?Sydney, 1845. Sean Connaire is a 24-year-old Irish Catholic carpenter building Victoria Barracks with his hands and his faith intact. He is good at his work, loyal to his father, and quietly in love with a woman he has known since childhood in County Clare.Then Dermot Spiers arrives from Ireland.They grew up together in Ennis. Swam in the same river. Shared the same faith. In Sydney, Dermot has reinvented himself with a false Ulster accent, a pew at an Anglican church, and a simple proposition for Sean: convert, partner up, and prosper. Sean refuses. It is the last honest conversation they will have.What follows is not an argument. It is a campaign. Dermot spreads sectarian lies that destroy Sean's father's furniture business. He arranges timber deals that undercut his competitors. He breaks into the factory at night to confirm the business is dying, then accelerates the collapse and earns a promotion doing it. When the business finally fails and Sean's father dies of a broken heart, Dermot frames Sean for timber theft and courts the woman they both love while Sean drinks himself into squalor.Sean Connaire is not a passive victim. He is also, for much of this novel, a drunk. His alcoholism is shown without mercy. The job losses, the shame, the withdrawal, the fragile weeks of sobriety that Dermot sabotages by spiking his lemonade at a family gathering. His recovery is hard-won and nobody hands it to him.His allies are a lawyer with his own demons, a loyal brother newly arrived from Melbourne, and an actress who loved the wrong man and decides, finally, to tell the truth. And there is Vonnie Flemming, who watches both men clearly and makes a deliberate, eyes-open choice about which one she trusts with her life.This is a novel about what it costs to be an honest man in a world that rewards the other kind. About whether the truth, when it finally comes out, is enough to give back what was stolen. About a woman who refuses to let her family choose her future for her.Can a man rebuild what was taken from him, or only prove it was stolen?Reputations is Book 7 in The Australian Sandstone Series. Every book in the series stands alone and can be read in any order.