Night Crossing

Don J. Snyder’s 2001 historical thriller Night Crossing is set in 1990s Northern Ireland, when a splinter group of the IRA was still staging terrorist bombings in order to achieve independence from Britain, defying the larger IRA organization’s recently signed cease-fire during the Good Friday Accords. In the novel, a pregnant American housewife stumbles into the middle of the infamous real-life bombing in the town of Omagh that killed twenty-nine people. In the process of extricating herself, she finds love and has several epiphanies that Kirkus Reviews calls “desperate banality.”

In 1998, Nora Andrews is a forty-three-year-old homemaker in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, whose life until now has been completely ordinary. When the novel opens, she has just discovered that she is unexpectedly pregnant. Almost simultaneously, she finds out that her husband is having an affair when she walks in on him having sex with another woman.

Furious, Nora leaves the house the same night. Her vague plan is to fly to the north of Ireland, to a place she, her husband, and her now-grown children last visited over twenty years earlier—she fell in love with the open green fields, and now imagines that walking through them again will allow her to determine what to do with the rest of her life.



Once Nora gets to the Republic of Ireland (the non-rebelling, non-Northern Ireland part of Ireland), she is convinced that the first thing she needs to do is get an abortion. However, since abortion is illegal in the Republic, she makes her way to a clinic in the middle of a nearby Northern Irish town—Omagh. Through the clinic’s window, she sees a British soldier sitting at a table in a café across the street. He seems nervous and shaken up in an odd way. A few minutes later, Nora hears a terrible roar followed by the sound of a woman screaming in the street.

A car bomb has just gone off. Nora runs outside, and sees the British soldier from the café, now bloody and wounded, running down the street alongside a panicked mother and her baby. Going on instinct, Nora rushes to his aid.

She manages to get the soldier away from the scene, but it quickly becomes clear that the danger to him is not yet over. Somehow, Nora finds herself on the run with this strange man, as she slowly pieces together the truth of his identity.



The soldier, Captain James Oliver Blackburn, is being hunted by both the IRA and by British Intelligence for his role in the bombing. He isn’t really a soldier, but a British Intelligence agent whose most recent assignment was to make sure this bombing inflicted maximum civilian damage as a way of turning the populace against the IRA once and for all. Although the IRA telephoned warning about the bomb about forty minutes before it went off, it was James’s job to confuse the information so that people would be sent toward the bomb rather than away from it by police. Now, the IRA wants to exact retribution, and British Intelligence want to stop him from revealing their secrets. (In reality, the theory that British Intelligence did this has some evidence behind it, but has never been conclusively proven.) When Nora saw him in the café, he was shaking with the guilt of knowing what he had done and the horror of what was about to happen.

Many of the novel’s readers are surprised that the protagonist’s love interest turns out to be a man responsible for almost thirty civilian deaths, but this exactly where Nora and James’s life on the run leads them. For eight days, they play a cat and mouse game with their pursuers. Nora finds it thrilling to have this man’s life in her hands and to think about the ways that her mundane existence has been disrupted. There are several opportunities for her to abandon James and return to Boston unhindered, but every time, she refuses to leave him.

Just as she realizes that she is in love with James, so she also has a revelation about the “grain of rice in her belly.” Following the advice of a kindly priest, who tells her, “Go and live, Nora. Spread your light across the world, and live,” she decides to keep the baby.



The chase culminates in a thrilling night crossing of the Irish Sea to Scotland, where James will be able to evade at least half of those chasing him. There, Nora and James confess their love for each other.

The novel ends with a coda that takes place several months later. Nora has returned to America to have her baby, and after the birth is about to board a plane to go back to James. Her oldest son, Jake, goes with her to the airport, and as he says goodbye, Nora isn’t sure whether by leaving America for good, she is gaining or losing a son.