Dolly Number One is the oh-so-proper and grieving widow of Lord Baltmore, who was killed by a blow during a match with Victorian Dublin’s reigning boxing champion. Cast by Baltmore’s death into penury, Dolly’s main concern has been to hide her straitened circumstances from society. However, the bequest of the aforementioned house frees her to focus on another pressing need: to meet the man who killed her husband and to understand why he committed the act that destroyed her comfortable life.

The focus of Dolly’s bitterness has problems of his own. Dick Creevy is haunted by Baltmore’s accidental death, but knows no other way than boxing to funnel his rage and frustration at the shambles his life has become. Unwilling to acknowledge that he is past his boxing prime, he has committed himself to a match with an infamously brutal up-and-comer - despite his coach’s gloomy prediction that he will lose, and be badly injured in the process.

Meanwhile, prim little Dolly - who is appalled by her new neighbor’s blunt talk of money troubles, and whose greatest regret is the loss of her safe, conventional lifestyle -has metamorphosed into Dolly Number Two, a plucky, daring lass who concocts a plan to masquerade as a male and solicit Dick’s tutelage in boxing. More remarkably, her hatred of her husband’s killer almost instantly vanishes in the face of an overwhelming lust for his brawny body. Poor Lord Baltmore!

Seeking to please her coach, Dolly adopts a G.I. Jane regimen of push-ups, calisthenics, and jump-rope, all the while averting her face from the boldly naked men who stride the floor of the boxing hall. However, now that an overheard conversation has revealed that her husband’s death was an accident, and she has realized Dick will never see her (or in this context, him) as a love interest, her motivation to train is ludicrously obscure. Perhaps a sudden need to become Irish featherweight champion?

Dick, disgusted by the lust he feels for his supposedly male student, decides to exorcise his “sexual illness” by hiring a prostitute who resembles said student. After overhearing him describe his specifications to a local madam, Dolly Number Three - who has rediscovered the hatred of Prim Dolly, but retains the pluck of G.I. Dolly - decides to “wreak absolute revenge” on her husband’s killer by hiring herself out to him as a prostitute. Um…okay. Anyway, Lewd Dolly, whose comfort with her new role exceeds all bounds of credibility, shares a night of mad passion with Dick, who must be extremely near-sighted not to remark the similarities between his pupil and his prostitute.

Now Dick’s obsessed with the mysteriously vanished prostitute, but he also can’t shake that disturbing affection for his male student. And all three Dollys are falling hard for him. How will this mess be cleared up? Also, will Dick triumph in his fast-approaching fight with Eric the Viking? And will Dolly start speaking in tongues? In and of itself, the author’s prose is commendable, so you just might feel compelled to find out.

--Meredith McGuire