An excellent novel of dark secrets and the Irish past is Thomas O'Malley's "In the Province of Saints." O'Malley's first novel is about Michael, a young boy in 1970s rural Ireland, where the ghosts seem to be as natural a part of the landscape as the trees. Michael knows that there are undercurrents of suspicion and distrust in his community. But it is not until the sudden death of a family friend that Michael grasps the full extent of the hatred close to him, as well as his own parents' intimate involvement in what may be murder. O'Malley was raised in Ireland and England, but later came to the U.S. to study at the acclaimed Iowa Writers' Workshop. He now lives in upstate New York. Buried beneath the murder-mystery surface of "In the Province of Saints" is the struggle of a young boy simply trying to figure out who his parents are. Inevitably, this also leads to an exploration of the sometimes dark forces which shaped Michael's community, and even his country. At one point Michael comments: "Father once said, You had to pick your battles, and that he'd never been much good at it." Michael's struggle, and O'Malley's fine achievement with this novel, is to try to figure out how any of us can win a battle we had no choice in whatsoever. ($23.95 / 320 pages / Little Brown)