Redmond O'Hanlon is the best and least known of Irish highwaymen. Only seven years of his life are documented: from 1674, when he was proclaimed an outlaw, to 1681, when he died. The rest belongs in the realm of fiction: stories, folktales, songs, and ballads. This gives the novelist free rein to indulge his imagination. In Ó'Hanlon novelist Ron Duffy has added to the fiction that has collected round the name of O'Hanlon. In doing so has created a resourceful Robin-Hood figure, who, at the age of twenty, is swept up in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The aim of the Rebellion is to win religious freedom and the return of lands confiscated from traditional chieftains, including the O'Hanlons. The Irish leadership is riven by mistrust and jealousy and lack the resources of the English and Scottish armies deployed against them. They go down to defeat by the disciplined forces of Oliver Cromwell. O'Hanlon flees to France and serves with distinction in both the French and Spanish armies at war in Flanders. Caught in dangerous situations, not all of them on the battlefield, and winning hearts as well as honours, O'Hanlon returns to Ireland. Expecting no restitution of his family's lands under the restored Charles II, O'Hanlon takes to the hills and woods of southern Ulster, the leader of a band of outlaws, famed as far as France for his daring exploits and his bold flaunting of attempts by the government in Ireland to capture him and rid the country of this most cunning and notorious challenge to their authority. This is Duffy's version of the O'Hanlon story. And who is to say that it didn't happen this way?