Terence M. Green's novels growing out of the history of his family in the last century, Shadow of Ashland and A Witness to Life, have won him much critical praise and a wide readership. Now, in St. Patrick's Bed, Green returns, at a point fifteen years later, to the story of Leo Nolan, who went to Ashland, Kentucky in search of his lost uncle, Jack Radey, and in finding him, also found a wife, Jeanne, and her young child, Adam.

Leo and Jeanne have been trying for a few years to have another child. And Adam, now a young man about to leave his teens, feels the need to trace and visit his true father, who abandoned his pregnant mother before he was born. Because he loves and wants to protect Adam, Leo decides that he had better visit the man first, and so he embarks on another trip into the past, from which he returns changed again.