Twenty years ago, Cormac Reilly drove out to an isolated cottage on his first call as a policeman. He thought he was doing a welfare check, but because of some muddle, he arrived to find two terrified children, Maude Blake, 15, and her brother Jack, 5, and their mother, dead of an apparent overdose. With no phone service available, Reilly broke protocol and took Maude and her badly injured brother to the hospital. Then Maude disappeared. Reilly has always felt he didn’t do enough for them.
Now Reilly has taken a job in Galway to be with his partner, Emma, who was offered a prestigious position in a lab. This move is a demotion for him, because he had been part of an elite squad in Dublin. There is something not right in the Galway office, though. Instead of taking advantage of his experience, his chief is assigning him cold cases and the officers are treating him oddly with the exception of Danny McIntyre, an old classmate. Soon he hears that someone is spreading false rumors about him.
Then the old case raises its head again with the death of Jack Blake, who apparently drowned himself in the river Corrib. Cormac is not assigned this case, though. After Maude reappears and insists that her brother’s death was not a suicide, he is told to pursue her for her mother’s murder.
McTiernan’s first novel, The Ruin is engaging and atmospheric. I liked it a lot.
What? Me Read? 