Fans of Emma Viskic,Jane Harper or Katherine Howell have a new author to look forward to: Dervla McTiernan. This Irish / Australian writer’s debut novel The Ruin (HarperCollins 2018) introduces us to Cormac Reilly, an Irish Garda (policeman) and I predict he will quickly become a firm favourite for crime-reading addicts.
The Ruin begins with one of Cormac’s first cases in 1993, when he is sent to a decrepit house where he discovers five-year-old Jack and 15-year-old Maude, both damaged and neglected, with their mother lying dead upstairs. It is a case Cormac is never able to forget. Twenty years later, a body is discovered in the river, and as Cormac investigates, he begins to join the dots between this suspicious death and that silent house of so many years earlier.
In a simultaneous narrative, we have the perspective of intern Aisling, who is dealt a significant grief at the start of the novel, and undertakes her own investigation to find out the truth. Several of the main characters – a mysterious woman who arrives from Australia, a detective whose sister has gone missing, a female detective who seems to be holding something back – are all drawn with care and complexity. And the plot rockets along like the very best crime novels, with not only the abandoned children and the suspicious death, but links to other murders, to drugs and perhaps to corruption in the force itself.
McTiernan has an exceptional eye for police procedural detail and for the timing and pace of investigations. Her characters – doctors, police, lawyers – are all well-researched. The characters’ family lives are brimming with authentic detail and plausible motivations, and their interior incentives are deliciously complicated. She weaves a complex web of intrigue, victims, suspects, motives and secrets, and strings us along so that we don’t know who belongs in which camp. Just when we think we’ve worked someone out, we uncover further information that jeopardises our assessment. And all the time in the background is the undercurrent of distrust in the authorities, in what they might do to protect you, or how far they might go to protect themselves.
This story is full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the very end. But more than that, it delivers characters that will prompt your curiosity, people that you will warm to and come to care about very much as the story progresses. McTiernan has set up the main protagonists with some great unanswered questions about their lives, which I’m sure will be explored in further novels in the series. I found a lot of depth in this novel, and a lot of heart. A really good crime novel rests on plot – that is what drives the narrative and entices you to turn the pages. But a great crime novel also gives us endearing and interesting characters, so that we are bound not only to the ‘what happens?’ of story, but also to the intimate minutia of ‘how and why does it happen?’. The Ruin offers both, and is a satisfying read that will leave you wanting more.