Dynasty of Death is a moving saga of two families, the epic struggle between two brothers, and the legacy their guns will leave the world as mighty enemy nations gear up for battle.

Fourteen-year-old Jason Aloysius Garrity is now of age to work full-time in a Pennsylvania coal factory, earning four dollars a week. His family left their hardscrabble life in Ireland to create a better one in America. But their shanty-like home on a street filled with outhouses, horse manure, and the ever-present odor of noxious gas is a hell all its own. Yet Jason possesses the passion and principles that will lift him out of the abject poverty surrounding his widowed mother, fanatically religious younger brother, and manipulative crippled sister.

On a stormy, windswept night, Guy Jerald tried to kill himself. But he did not die. Now, the 55-year-old Pennsylvania power broker and business titan - a living example of the American Dream - lies in a bed in a psychiatric hospital. He is on suicide watch, barely able to recognize his wife and two adult children. But a visitor from his distant past will open the floodgates. During one of the most harrowing battles of World War II, Guy saved the life of fellow soldier James Meyer. Now, James is a celebrated British psychiatrist determined to repay the favor.

Joseph Armagh was 13 when he first saw America through a dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850s, and he was a penniless orphan cast on a hostile shore to make a home for himself and his younger brother and infant sister. Some 70 years later, from his deathbed, Joseph Armagh last glimpsed his adopted land from the gleaming windows of a palatial estate. A multimillionaire, one of the most powerful and feared men, Joseph Armagh had indeed found a home.

Living with her aunt in poor, rural Preston, Pennsylvania, 13-year-old Ellen Watson loves books and music and is completely oblivious to her own beauty. But her extraordinary looks arouse envy and malice in the female townspeople - and lust in the males. Hired as a housemaid in the palatial home of the village mayor, Ellen soon catches the attention of his son, Jeremy Porter, who captures her heart in turn. He offers to send her to school, and four years later he proposes marriage. As the years pass, Ellen's life parallels the hopes, dreams, and fears of a no-longer innocent nation.