title: Shooter in a Plague Year: A Kavanagh Story III
author: Jim Wills
description: Jim Wills, author of Shooter in a Plague Year, the third of the Kavanagh stories, and the three other chronologically arranged titles in the saga: A Few Men Faithful, I, Philly MC, II, and This Hard Gemlike Flame, IV, has had careers as varied as the novels he writes. He has been a motorcycle mechanic, academic, hard rock miner, book editor, a commercial writer, mason, baker and an author. His lifelong interest in Irish history and literature, with all their triumphs and failures, forms the bedrock for these novels. Each one stands on its own, but they are more rewarding read as a continuous history of the Kavanagh family, in Ireland, in North America, from 1916 to 2020. His fascination with dialect, street vocabulary, and musical lyrics that define a place, a culture, and a time are evident throughout. He lives in rural Ontario with his partner, Wendy Carlson, and, betimes, Wendys daughter, Kate Amies. Other works by the same author include Tools Are Made, Born Are Hands: Baking True Artisan Breads in a Wood Fired Oven.
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  # Unforeseen Circumstances
  
  
  My precognition warned me just in time and I jerked my head back. Half a
  second later there was a high harmonic _crack_ as a bullet whipped through the
  space that had just a moment ago been occupied by my right eye. My would-be
  assassin was a very good shot.
  
  
  That last bit of information was enough to make me sure that I did not want to
  make a run for it. The ground around the tree was rolling grassland for fifty
  yards in every direction and I had no intention of trying my luck. I hugged
  the tree and waited.
  
  
  Ten seconds passed, twenty. How long would the assassin stay with his sights
  trained on the tree? He couldn’t afford to wait forever; the more time he
  spent in his position the better the chance of being found. Thirty seconds.
  Forty. I looked into the future and saw that putting my head out wasn’t going
  to attract another bullet. Maybe he’d gone? No, there was another attack
  coming, 