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J. Michael O'Connor
Small-town America is the background of J. Michael O'Connor's Ghosts of My Mind, a mind-blowing perspective of the dark side of small-town America. O'Connor's Novel shows the guts-and-spit reality, which contradicts America's picturesque postcard with the quiet tree-lined street, well-kept lawns, and tiny churches in the town square. The book's protagonist, James Patrick O'Francis, increasingly unhappy in the crime-infested city, moves his family to a rural area deep in the Appalachian Mountains where his sons can enjoy the clean air, closeness, and security of a small town.​
O'Francis does not expect to encounter the callousness and malice a corrupt political system offers an outsider. His belief in honor and integrity is soon challenged in a way he could never imagine.​
O'Francis' saga continues in the small community in which he chose to settle with his family. However, the picturesque foothills of the Appalachian Mountains concealed a political system with a seedy underbelly.
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O'Francis's persistence to educate his students (in what would become his famous "Think Tank") about prejudice and discrimination created an environment for his antagonists to launch a character assassination campaign on his name.
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O'Francis refused to succumb to the "inline" political ideology of the bastardized system in which he worked. They then went after his sons and his wife.
Just who was James Patrick O'Francis? Was he the simple teacher that did not fit the traditional "educational box"? Was he an unknown personality drifting through an alternative life? Where, exactly, did the O'Francis enigma" fit in the world? ​
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John O'Donovan realized that the citadel of protection O'Francis had constructed and securely hidden from everyone within the community he resided in seemed to be crumbling away due to the demands and stresses brought on by the powers that be in his professional life.
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If that alter ego of O'Francis' was released for some unforeseen reason, it would be for the justifiable motives brought on by mendacity, dissembling, and hypocrisy of the people surrounding him and his family would ultimately yet regretfully evolve into the pursuit of justice. That mission would be completed with a devastating climax, as the grim reaper would have his day.
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Author J. Michael O'Connor takes his character from a simple teacher into a new world of isolation, money, and power.
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James Particks' world was about to take him down a new path. A path he did not see coming and was not ready for. His world of once being a simple teacher was about to change in ways he could not imagine in his most bizarre dreams. J. Patrick O'Francis would have to call upon his Ranger quotes; Adapt and Overcome."
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His long-time friend Paul dubbed "The Man" would be his "six" through all his new environments. Paul would guide, counsel, and assist O'Francis.
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James Patrick's life as a high school teacher was unlike the typical publicly perceived high school teachers. Instead, he had real-life experiences in his portfolio. A folder that should not be opened. A Pandora's Box.
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With one attack on his family name after another, which he took personally, and his family losses, J. Patrick evolved into an older form of his past where morals and immoral met in the shadows of right and wrong, good and evil. Protect the "good," eradicate the "evil," and obtain justice.
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For J. Patrick and his Celtic philosophy, revenge was a peaceful resolution to his pain.
After James Patrick O'Francis had lost his beloved soulmate, three years slowly passed as he grieved deeply. Then, deep in his forest sanctuary, his feelings went cold.
His entire world changes. J. Patrick became the name that all would come to know him by. He became bitter, callous, and calculating beyond anything his long-time friend Paul had ever seen in any man.
Failure was never an option for J. Patrick.
He never took anything for granted...he planned every action down to the finite detail.
Henceforth, he would travel the pathway of life with one goal, a mournful dirge for those with no moral integrity.
