Hickory, NC — Jim Haughey, a college professor and longtime literary scholar, vividly brings history to life in his new historical novel, The Broken Season, published by Redhawk Publications. Set in the rugged Appalachian Mountains just before the Civil War, the novel blends suspense, historical detail, and psychological depth into a gripping murder mystery centered around Irish immigrant laborers carving a railroad tunnel through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In The Broken Season, hundreds of Irish workers endure brutal conditions as they blast through granite in a remote Appalachian camp. Accidents, disease, alcohol, and violence haunt their daily lives. When a young laborer is sentenced to death for murder, a weary priest arrives to give last rites, only to uncover a secret darker than the condemned man admits.

Haughey said the novel allowed him to combine his love of research with the creative freedom of fiction.

“For years, I wrote about other writers and their work, but I always wondered what it would be like to mix research with imagination,” Haughey said. “Writing historical fiction gave me the freedom to create something entirely my own while still grounding it in history.”

Unlike the structured nature of academic criticism, Haughey adopted a more exploratory approach to crafting the novel.

“With academic writing, there tends to be a formula you follow,” he explained. “But with fiction, I often let the story lead me. Sometimes I had to retrace my steps, but other times I discovered scenes and ideas I never could have planned ahead.”

Haughey has previously published The First World War in Irish Poetry through Bucknell University Press and has spent nearly thirty years writing literary criticism. The Broken Season marks his move into fiction after six years of creative writing.

The novel will appeal to fans of historical fiction and murder mysteries, especially those interested in 19th-century Southern Appalachia, Irish immigrant history, and the social tensions surrounding the Mexican-American War and the approaching Civil War.