The Wild Irish Boy (1808) was Charles Robert Maturin's second novel. Set in Ireland and England, the story follows the adventures of Ormsby Bethel, a young Irishman of uncertain ancestry, as he navigates through the temptations of high life, the intrigues of swindlers, gamblers, and fast women, and his own uncertainties about his place in the societies of both countries. Combining features of the silver fork novel, coming-of-age story, and to some degree (in scenes of Irish life) the national novel, The Wild Irish Boy is an entertaining tale full of unexpected twists and turns, extravagant scenes of fashionable excess, misguided and dangerous passions, and long-held secrets with dire consequences: riches and ruin, both moral and financial. Among the colorful characters is the too-fascinating Lady Montrevor, cultured, ingenious, and enigmatic, who adds a dimension of excitement and intrigue that contributes to making The Wild Irish Boy a novel rich with conflicting social and moral viewpoints.

This autobiographical novel narrates the journey of Dan Docherty, a young Glasgow law graduate and karate black belt, who left his traditional Catholic family in 1975 to serve in the notoriously corrupt Royal Hong Kong Police. In Hong Kong, he learned Chinese language intensively, then drill, musketry and law. A famous Tai Chi master accepted him as a disciple and trained him to become an international full contact champion. In this book we'll have a few beers with colourful characters like Big Don and Mountie Dave. We'll visit exotic locales--Manila, Macao, Singapore... We'll witness Dan in full contact competition and in street fight action. As they say in the Hong Kong Police, "If you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined."

Two young men, Jim, the naive, scholarly son of a Dublin shopkeeper, and Doyler, a rough working boy, struggle with issues of political, religious, and sexual identity in the year leading up to the Easter uprising of 1916.