Tag: Dervla McTiernan

Review 2123: The Murder Rule

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Hannah has left her alcoholic, dependent mother in Maine for the University of Virginia. There she uses deceit and some dirty tricks to get onto the Innocence Project. In particular, she gets herself onto the case of Michael Dandridge.

Dandridge has been in jail for 11 years, found guilty of rape and murder. However, his sentence has recently been vacated. The original prosecutor is determined to retry him.

Hannah’s goal is to interfere with the project’s defense of Dandridge. We learn why slowly as passages from her mother’s diary are revealed, dated 25 years before.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about McTiernan’s change of locale, her other novels being set in Ireland, but her storytelling took over, and I found myself reading another page-turner. Although I was not sure that things could turn out the way they did, I found the novel thrilling.

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Review 1879: The Good Turn

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Garda Peter Fisher doesn’t make the report of a kidnapped girl a priority because the information is conveyed in a garbled form, but when he questions the witness, he begins to take it seriously. When he gets a lead on a possible escape vehicle and Sergeant Cormac Reilly is busy with the family, he goes out alone to intercept the suspect. The suspect drives his vehicle directly at Peter, so he shoots him. Then the girl is found unharmed.

Cormac’s boss, Brian Murphy, refused him extra resources when the girl was reported kidnapped, and now he suspends Cormac, labeling the case a complete fiasco. But Cormac believes Peter reacted correctly and the suspect was guilty. In the meantime, Peter is sent to work under his own father in his small home town.

Peter thinks a murder case has been closed prematurely, so he begins investigating it properly. Soon he begins to suspect someone has murdered two old men and is killing his own grandmother.

Cormac gets on the track of corruption in his station and begins working with Interpol. In the meantime, his relationship with his girlfriend seems to be going south.

This is another interesting crime novel by McTiernan with a complex plot.

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Review 1855: The Scholar

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The Scholar is the second novel in Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly series. Cormac, who left an elite Dublin squad for Galway because of his girlfriend Emma’s opportunity at a local pharmaceutical lab, is still being given cold cases, despite his success with his last case. But of the three sergeants in the squad, Carrie O’Halloran is handling many more cases, so she asks to offload some of them. Reilly gets the Henderson case. He is barely started on it when he receives an alarming call from Emma. On the way to work at the lab, she has found the body of a hit-and-run victim.

Reilly realizes that he should probably not take the case, but it is quickly established that Emma’s car could not have run over the victim. Also, he feels protective of Emma and thinks he can help her if he is in charge of the case. The victim seems to be Carline Darcy, the granddaughter of a giant in pharmaceuticals, or at least Carline’s ID for the lab is in her pocket. However, when the police go to interview her roommates, they find Carline alive, and she denies any knowledge of the girl. Reilly thinks she’s lying.

The girl turns out to be Della Lambert, a dropout of the university. Although she comes from a poor family, she seems to have lots of money. The lab denies any knowledge of her, but Emma is sure she’s seen her there with Carline.

This was another complex mystery with interesting characters, although I found Emma to be enigmatic. She had very little presence in the first novel, but there were hints of something in her past. In this novel, those events are explained.

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Review 1817: The Ruin

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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.

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