In 1924 Michael McDare is in an internment camp in England for Irish rebels. He escapes to the United States, and plots for three years a political assassination. He collects money, works out his plan to the minutest details, and then returns to Dublin in disguise. He persuades a small group of accomplices, all past associates in the Irish republic cause to assist him.

There is McFetterich, known as Fetch and also as Gutty. He is something of a hothead, eager to rush in and eager to take the lead in the plot.

Then there is Kitty Mellett. She comes from a bourgeois family, the rest of whom were very anti-republican. McDare had been in love with Kitty when he had previously lived in Ireland and still seems to have an affection for her.

Lastly there is Tumulty. Tumulty had been thrown out of the republican movement for being too unreliable. He is not very reliable but is able to get a lot of men together to assist as well as to steal the necessary getaway car.

The Assassin is a political thriller-a story of revolution and anarchy-and a psychological novel. Mr. O'Flaherty has sought first to examine the idea of political assassination and secondly to survey the forces in play in revolutionary Irish politics in the 1920's. The assassination he narrates is modelled upon an actual sensational event which occurred in 1927. On 10 July 1927 Kevin O'Higgins was assassinated in the streets of Dublin. He had fought for Irish independence but had become more conservative and, as Minister of Justice of the Irish Free State, had signed the execution orders of seventy-seven political prisoners. His assassination was the IRA's revenge for that action.

The Assassin is a masterly investigation of the mind and motives behind a political murder. It deals with violent death, a central alienated individual, the city and the frequently grotesque creatures who inhabit its 'underworld'. And like all of O'Flaherty's thrillers, The Assassin captures a time and a facet of Dublin life in a way that no other fiction has succeeded in doing.