Author Linden MacIntyre explores dark and violent period in history

It was a clearly expressed mandate — “the stamping out of terrorism by secret murder.”

That’s how one highly-placed observer saw the situation more than a century ago when the Irish War of Independence was raging and the British government was determined to suppress it by whatever means possible.

So if it was necessary to counter civil unrest and domestic terrorism with indiscriminate brutality and state-sanctioned killings — well, it was for the good of the empire, wasn’t it?

Award-winning Canadian writer Linden MacIntyre was drawn to these violent times because of the abiding mystery surrounding the man in charge of the British response — a distinguished First World War hero so tarnished by his two years in Ireland, and so vulnerable to assassination in the aftermath, that he spent th