Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Ruin
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://dervlamctiernan.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2018006862
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018006862
HEADING: McTiernan, Dervla
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053 _0 |a PR9619.4.M45
100 1_ |a McTiernan, Dervla
670 __ |a The ruin, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Dervla McTiernan) data view (born in Ireland and now lives with her family in Australia, where she works for the Mental Health Commission; The Ruin is her first novel)
PERSONAL
Born in Ireland; married; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Works for the Mental Health Commission. Worked formerly as a lawyer.
MEMBER:Sisters in Crime and Crime Writers Association, member.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Dervla McTiernan is an Australia-based writer. Before becoming a writer, she worked for twelve years as a lawyer in Ireland, her homeland. Following the global financial crisis, she, her husband, and their two children, moved to Australia. McTiernan had always been a fan of crime and detective novels, so she decided to try out writing. She wrote a short story, “The Room Mate,” and submitted it to the Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Competition. The story was shortlisted for the prize, and this inspired McTiernan to dedicate herself to writing a crime novel. McTiernan is a member of the Sisters in Crime and Crime Writers Association and was a New Blood Panelist at Harrogate Festival. She and her family live in Perth, Australia.
The Ruin, McTiernan’s first novel, is the opening novel in the detective “Cormac Reilly” series. The book has been published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, where it was a top ten bestseller. It was named one of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Crime Mystery and Thrillers of 2018 and an Amazon Best Book of July 2018. In the book, Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly has recently moved to Galway, Ireland with his girlfriend. As a newcomer to the town’s police force, Cormac is not excited about starting at the bottom once again. The police force is not friendly, and Cormac is tasked with the tedious work of looking through old cold cases. He is shocked when he comes across one case from decades ago.
Twenty years earlier, when Cormac was a new, young cop, he was sent to a decrepit mansion to investigate what he has been told was merely a minor domestic incident. He knew that the mansion was occupied by an alcoholic single mother and her two children. Rumor had it that the woman had drunk away the family fortune, and the two young children, Jack and Maude, were essentially fending for themselves. What Cormac discovered when he arrived at the home was a much more tragic scene. The woman had died from an apparent heroin overdose, and the two children were living in destitution. Five-year-old Jack was put in foster care and teenaged Maude became a young runaway.
Now, twenty years later, Cormac is saddened to hear that in a recent case, the body of twenty-five-year-old Jack has recently been found in the river. Jack’s pregnant girlfriend, Aisling, is heartbroken by the news. The two recently found out the Aisling is pregnant and they were trying to decide whether to or not to keep the baby, as a pregnancy would interfere with Aisling’s aspirations of becoming a surgeon. The night before Jack’s death, they had had a heated argument about the matter. Aisling is devastated to learn about Jack’s death, particularly as it appears to be a suicide. Soon, however, Aisling comes to her senses and refuses to believe that the death was a suicide. At the same time, long-lost Maude shows up and joins Aisling in her fight for the truth. As the two women investigate the death of Jack, Cormac looks back into the case of Jack and Maude’s mother, and the paths of the two investigations inevitably cross.
Henrietta Verma in Booklist wrote that the story “includes compelling, unexpected twists and a hold-your-breath standoff, adding, “McTiernan should find success with this start to a promising series.” Andrea Thompson in Austcrime website described the book as “a ripper of a read and remarkably polished for a debut novel,” adding, “The Ruin is so confidently written with fully rounded characters that we are assured of some great reading from this series in the future.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2018, Henrietta Verma, review of The Ruin, p. 27.
ONLINE
AustCrime, http://www.austcrimefiction.org/ (July 7, 2018), review of The Ruin.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (September 19, 2018), review of The Ruin.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, https://www.smh.com.au/ (April 6, 2018), review of The Ruin.
DERVLA
MCTIERNAN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dervla McTiernan
Internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed writer, Dervla McTiernan is the author of The Ruin, her crime debut set in Ireland. The Ruin is the first in the detective Cormac Reilly series and has been published in the United States, the UK and Ireland, and in New Zealand and Australia, where it was a top ten bestseller. It has been named one of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Crime Mystery and Thrillers of 2018 and an Amazon Best Book of July 2018. Dervla was a New Blood Panelist at Harrogate Festival.
Dervla spent twelve years working as a lawyer. Following the global financial crisis, she moved to Australia and turned her hand to writing. An avid fan of crime and detective novels from childhood, Dervla wrote a short story, The Room Mate which was shortlisted for the Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Competition. She went on to write The Ruin, and this will be followed by The Scholar. The Ruin has been optioned for TV by Hopscotch. Dervla is a member of the Sisters in Crime and Crime Writers Association, and lives in Perth, Australia, with her husband and two children.
She is represented by Tara Wynne, Curtis Brown Australia.
How crime writer Dervla McTiernan's life changed twice in one day
Linda Morris
By Linda Morris
17 February 2018 — 1:09pm
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On a Friday in July, the day before Dervla McTiernan was to head off on a long weekend holiday with her two young children, husband and the family's golden retriever, the Perth-based lawyer received two pieces of life-changing news.
Dashing into the GP clinic to pick up the results of a precautionary MRI scan, McTiernan was told bluntly she had a tumour, probably a craniopharyngioma, a benign but invasive growth lodged in the base of the brain.
Dervla McTiernan.
Dervla McTiernan.
Photo: JULIA DUNIN
Without urgent surgery she faced potentially catastrophic health consequences including blindness, pituitary failure and a much-shortened life.
The efficient GP thumbed through the physicians reference guide and wrote the names of three neurosurgeons on a yellow Post-It note. "You need to call these three surgeons and whoever can see you first is the surgeon you need to see," she told the doubting McTiernan.
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan.
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan.
Photo: Julia Dunn
"Oddly, I thought she was a little bit cracked," McTiernan recalled. "I was out in my car two minutes later and I thought, 'That's all a bit shocking, but this can't be right because who does that? If this was so serious that's not the way to deliver [the news]'."
At that very moment her phone buzzed, alerting her to an incoming email. It was from an American agent requesting a copy of her crime novel, set in her home town of Galway in Ireland and written in the quiet hours while her daughter and son slept.
It was the first hint of interest in a manuscript which would be snapped up by Harper Collins in a six-way auction for Australian rights, and later sold into Britain and the United States.
"It felt like I was in an episode of The Truman Show, that I was much too boring and the director had just said, 'Right, we need to throw in some stuff. Let's throw in a brain tumour, throw in an agent and mix the story up a little bit'."
McTiernan is the latest standard bearer for what Sisters in Crime Australia is calling a new golden age of Australian crime writing, with women to the fore.
"Australian crime writing is thriving, with a boom in numbers of publications and TV productions and increasingly high standards in writing and production quality," Robyn Walton, vice president of Sisters in Crime, says. "Consumers of Australian crime writing can now choose from a broad range, from easy-to-read-and-watch entertainments through to thoughtful analytical essays and literary re-imaginings."
Sixteen years ago, when the group launched its Davitt Awards to provide overdue recognition for Australian women crime writers who at that stage were largely unheralded when it came to awards, reviews and media, a mere seven books were eligible for the first year of competition. In 2017, 99 books were in contention. Among the Davitt's first winners were Gabrielle Lord and Kathryn Fox, prolific writers in the genre.
Like authors Megan Goldin, Cath Ferla, Sarah Bailey, and Sara Foster, McTiernan, found confidence to write at book length after receiving recognition for a short story she wrote for the sister's Scarlet Stiletto awards. The number of short stories submitted to the Stilettos has grown each year and is nearing 200 now.
Crime writer Megan Goldin.
Crime writer Megan Goldin.
There are ''sisters" working in fiction and non-fiction, television production, direction, scriptwriting and film.
With her suburban mystery, Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty has cracked Hollywood and Kerry Greenwood (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) US cable television. Candice Fox is attracting an international readership via her action-packed collaborations with James Patterson.
Crime writing for young adult and child readers is growing too, says Walton, and thanks to Helen Garner's literary observations of the criminal justice system, non-fiction true crime is shucking off its tabloid reputation.
Sarah Schmidt's debut novel about the infamous Lizzie Borden case is selling into international markets. Former astrophysicist and corporate lawyer Sulari Gentill is now up to her eighth book in her Rowland Sinclair series, set in the 1930s in Australia and overseas.
Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Nicole Kidman in the HBO production of Liane Moriarty's
Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Nicole Kidman in the HBO production of Liane Moriarty's
Contrary to popular belief, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe did not solely invent the crime genre, according to Lucy Sussex, who has researched Australia's female crime writing pioneers.
They each had formidable female rivals. Ellen Davitt, for whom the Davitt awards are named, was the author of Australia's first mystery novel, Force and Fraud, published in 1865 and still in this day, says Sussex, "a damn good read". As the sister-in-law of Anthony Trollope, Davitt should have been able to use the connection to get her story published as a book, but like her contemporary Mary Fortune, who wrote more than 500 stories under pseudonyms, had to be content to be published in magazines. They were therefore forgotten.
Novelist Sarah Schmidt wrote a fictional version of the story of Lizzie Borden.
Novelist Sarah Schmidt wrote a fictional version of the story of Lizzie Borden.
Photo: Stefan Postles
Australian woman, Geraldine Halls wrote Beat Not the Bones, which won the Mystery Writers of America's first Edgar award before even Raymond Chandler. That should have been the turning point for greater recognition of women crime writers in this country, says Sussex, but Halls was an expat and crime fiction wasn't highly rated in Australian then, despite the works of Arthur W. Upfield.
Former journalist Jane Harper is Australia's current crime darling, having taken out the prestigious award in 2017 with The Dry, a runaway bestseller set in rural Victoria that has sold 150,000 copies in 20 countries and is to be made into a movie by Reese Witherspoon.
Harper found critical success and readers following Miles Franklin award winner Peter Temple into the "poetics of landscape", Fairfax crime reviewer Sue Turnbull said.
Award-winning crime author Jane Harper.
Award-winning crime author Jane Harper.
Photo: Simon Schluter
Inevitably the success of one type of crime novel sets off a trend, with writers penning their own variations, and women have been influencing genre themes and characters as both writers and readers. Female detectives, which first appeared in the 1980s, are here to stay as exemplars of professional women, Sussex says.
If crime fiction is in a wave at the moment, it is probably that of domestic noir which eschews conventional detectives and is focused on the anxiety of the central character, says Turnbull. "I've just read The Woman in the Window, which harks back to Rear Window while also echoing The Girl on the Train. Again it's that jazz metaphor - here's the melodic theme, now see what you can do with it."
It's the ability to improvise with the structures of the crime novel and the high-stakes plotting which brought McTiernan to write crime.
The Ruin begins with Inspector Cormac Reilly, once the golden boy of an elite anti-terrorist unit, wading through a box of cold case files in the Mill Street police station.
Reilly is a cleanskin who comes to regret his handling of a case involving a 14-year-old girl and her brother when police investigate an apparent suicide drowning on the evening of St Patrick's Day.
The setting is rain-sodden Galway, where McTiernan grew up in a family of seven, studied corporate law, married and set up legal practice before she was caught in the wreckage of the global financial crisis.
The book began with a single image of two children sitting forlorn on the stairs of a ruined Georgian pile.
"I had this character in my head from the very beginning, and that is Maude, she is an elder sister, 15 years old, and her little brother Jack is five. I knew her background, that she had been protecting Jack from the day he was born, that they had a difficult home life and things had reached a particular crisis point. Cormac came later, he was someone I had to get to know in my head."
Unlike the brooding Inspector Rebus, Reilly doesn't self-medicate with whisky and has transferred out of the limelight to assist the career of the woman he loves.
McTiernan says she wasn't interested in a morally conflicted, boozing detective. "God, life is hard enough," says the first-time author who migrated to Australia six years ago.
"We came here with no family, nothing. When we booked our flights [my husband] didn't even have a job. We only had each other to rely on.
"[My son] Oisin didn't sleep for 2½ years so it was hard, but it made us so much stronger and so much more able to batten down the hatches and know what is important."
Readying herself for surgery in 2016, McTiernan finished her final draft, "bombed it" out to agents and then wrote a list of things that could go wrong.
"Complete recovery? That's great," she told herself.
"Loss of peripheral vision? I could cope with that. There were grades of pituitary failure you could have, partial or complete, and I wrote those down. Next was complete sight loss and there were others beyond that.
"I drew the line just before complete sight loss because I thought, 'How could I get to work, get the kids places if I can't see at all?"'
The tumour was successfully removed. The Ruin is out this month.
Writing a novel is hard but the story shouldn’t be. It should be your favourite thing
‘You want to believe people couldn’t have knowingly let that go on behind those walls. But then you remember the bogey-man industrial school threats, and you wonder’
Fri, Mar 9, 2018, 05:40
Dervla McTiernan
Dervla McTiernan: the same country that gave me a happy, stable childhood allowed for the institutionalised neglect and abuse of thousands of children. Photograph: Julia Dunin
Dervla McTiernan: the same country that gave me a happy, stable childhood allowed for the institutionalised neglect and abuse of thousands of children. Photograph: Julia Dunin
It took me a long time to find the story I was able to tell. For years I carried around the seeds of something different – I had the characters, the setting, the incident that would kick the story off, but I could do nothing with it. I gave it time, poked it and prodded it but it was stale. A dead thing. It was only when I gave that up, turned away from it entirely and wrote something new, something closer to home, that I found my rhythm. I’ll never make that mistake again, try to create something that my head tells me I should write but for which I feel very little.
Writing a novel is hard, but it shouldn’t be hard in that way. What is hard is finding the time, fitting it around a day job and children. It’s hard too to build your confidence in your work when the first 20,000 words are, inevitably, rubbish. But the story itself shouldn’t be hard. The story should be your favourite thing. It should call to you in between making the lunches, doing the school drop, between the pages of other novels.
The first scene of The Ruin came to me whole, fully formed. I saw two children, sitting on the stairs in a decaying hunting lodge in the country, holding hands. Their mother has died. Maude is 15 and Jack is only five. They are alone, it’s getting dark outside, and they are afraid. I knew that Maude loved Jack deeply, that she’d loved and protected him since the day he was born. But I knew too that things were about to reach a crisis point, and her fear was not for herself, but for him, that she might not be able to save him again.
That was all I had, that little shard of something, but it was enough. I knew Maude from top of her head to the bottom of her second-hand boots, and I wanted to write her story because I wanted, desperately, to find out what happened next.
It doesn’t always work that way, of course. Maude may have come easily but other characters had to be dragged, kicking and screaming onto the stage. That’s the way it is sometimes, and it’s one of the reasons that writing can be so deeply rewarding. There are the easy joys and then there are the elements that ask you to stretch further, to dig deeper, to feel emotions that aren’t easy to feel and to define ideas that began as the merest suggestion of a sketch in your mind. The satisfaction that comes with winning those battles is lasting.
The most quoted advice to writers is to write what you know, which is, of course, largely nonsense. What thin things our stories would be if writers followed that advice
The most quoted advice to writers is to write what you know, which is, of course, largely nonsense. What thin things our stories would be if writers followed that advice. It is true, though, that we feed something of ourselves into our stories. I was born in Cork in 1976 and lived in Ireland until 2011, when the repercussions of the GFC (global financial crisis) briskly ushered us towards emigration. I am, despite my expat status, Irish to the soles of my shoes. I didn’t set out to write a crime novel. I set out to write an Irish crime novel, and the story is formed by the economic and social context in which it is set.
I had a happy childhood, with loving, hard-working parents and lots of siblings. I grew up with a great love of my country, and great pride in my nationality. That pride suffered some foundation-cracking knocks over the years since, as it did I think for many people. After all, the same country that gave me a happy, stable childhood allowed for the institutionalised neglect and abuse of thousands of children over many decades.
I grew up at the tail-end of the old Ireland. When I was a child, people still threatened their children with industrial schools: “If you don’t behave yourself you’ll be sent to the Brothers.” Then later, when the full truth of those places came out, the dreadful neglect, the horrific abuse that went on there, everyone said they hadn’t known, that nobody had known what was really going on. You have to accept that, you certainly want to believe that people couldn’t have knowingly let that go on behind those walls. But then you remember the bogey-man industrial school threats, and you wonder. So those thoughts, that wondering, the trying to understand, all of that made its way into the book to some degree. The questions I’ve been left with are questions that my detective protagonist, Cormac Reilly, must face too.
Cormac returns to small-town Galway after stepping down from his high-ranking Dublin job to support his partner’s career. When a body surfaces in the icy River Corrib he is plunged back into a cold case that has haunted him for 20 years – the death of a mother of two small children. What links the two deaths, two decades apart? On his return to Galway he is forced to re-examine his old case, but more than that, forced to look behind the shadows, behind the half-hidden suggestions and search out the truths that he had never heard spoken but which a thousand half-formed sentences had suggested.
Reilly is unusual for a fictional police detective in that he’s not a hard-drinking, hard-living emotional illiterate with three failed marriages in his past. He’s a decent person. Not perfect, but he’s in a strong relationship. I didn’t consciously set out to write him in this way, but I did set out to create a character I could like and admire, and the truth is that most of the men I know are like that – they go to work, and pull their weight at home, and generally do their best with what life gives them.
More than anything else I just wanted to write a really good story, a novel with characters that you find yourself thinking about months later, because they feel real, and like they matter. I wanted very much to write a book about people who are essentially good, doing their best in a bad situation. It seems more hopeful that way.
Dervla McTiernan is the author of The Ruin (Sphere)
The Ruin
Henrietta Verma
Booklist.
114.18 (May 15, 2018): p27.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Ruin.
By Dervla McTiernan.
July 2018.400p. Penguin, paper, $16 (9780143133124).
The ruin here is a decaying Galway, Ireland, mansion where an Anglo-Irish family is hanging on by a
thread. An alcoholic single mother, who has long since run through her family's fortune, is drinking away
her final days there while her young children, Maude and Jack, fend for themselves. As a new policeman,
Cormac Reilly is sent to the home for what he believes is a "minor domestic"; instead, he finds the woman
dead, and the children in squalor. Years later, the case comes back to haunt Reilly when Jack is found
drowned. Jack's girlfriend, Aisling, and Maude believe Jack may have been murdered and push for a
thorough investigation despite police insistence that Jack killed himself. The story that unfolds shows the
worst of Irish society and its police force, and includes compelling, unexpected twists and a hold-yourbreath
standoff. Debut author McTiernan should find success with this start to a promising series. Hand this
one to readers of Tana French and to police-procedural fans.--Henrietta Verma
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Verma, Henrietta. "The Ruin." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 27. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400823/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=07b161c7.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400823
Books
Not the Booker: The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan review – thriller lost in plot
Opening with a powerful, sensitively drawn portrait of two bereaved children, this book’s drama soon becomes mechanical
Help us judge this year’s Not the Booker prize
Sam Jordison
@samjordison
Wed 19 Sep 2018 05.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 27 Sep 2018 05.35 EDT
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Plodding …
Affecting scenes give way to plodding police procedural … Photograph: Alamy
Dervla McTiernan’s path to publication has been unusually smooth. That’s not the same as easy. She clearly had to put in plenty of hard yards, writing at nights after finishing up at her day job and putting her children to bed. But still. She says she started writing in earnest in 2014, having given herself five years to make a go of it – but that within just two years (by early December 2016) she found herself the subject of publishing auction and signed up for a two-book deal.
“It helped,” she has said, “that I had a story, or at least the beginning of one. It was a single image, really. A girl, 15-year-old Maude Blake, sits on the stairs in a crumbling Georgian country house. She’s holding hands with her little brother, Jack, who’s only five. It’s getting dark outside, and they are afraid. Without writing a word I knew who Maude was, knew how deeply she loved her brother, what she had done to protect him. I knew, too, that things had reached a crisis point. I had to write the book to find out what happened next.”
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This scene is where The Ruin opens, and I can understand why it attracted publishers’ attention. There’s real emotional power as an uncertain and nervous young policeman called Cormac Reilly finds the pair alone in that mouldering house, with their mother dead in a bed upstairs and the children already packed in preparation for being taken away. “There was something so utterly pathetic about the two little bags,” thinks Cormac, and you can just see it.
When McTiernan moves the action forward 20 years to a flat in Galway, it’s equally involving. Adult Jack discovers his partner is pregnant, a precarious situation as trainee doctor Aisling feels it could hurt her chances of becoming a surgeon. There are no histrionics; the couple talk it over quietly and lovingly, in a way that feels intimate and real. Which makes it all the more tragic when Jack goes out, doesn’t come home, and we’re told he’s killed himself.
Aisling’s grappling with grief is impressively and empathetically written, and for a while it feels as if this is going to be a very sensitive and well-written crime novel. So it’s a shame when these affecting scenes give way to a rather more plodding police procedural, as Cormac finds himself investigating that 20-year-old death again, and Aisling and Maude team up to find out what has happened to Jack in the present. There’s an intriguing amount of perplexity as the story gets rolling, but this uncertainty soon starts to feel overplayed. “There was an agenda at play here,” we’re told. “There’s something here, I have a feeling,” we hear later. “This one is different for you, isn’t it?” Cormac’s wife remarks. There’s also a fair bit of cooked-to-a-crisp dialogue:
‘Jesus,’ Maude said. ‘Your arrogance. You think you know everything, and you know nothing.’
‘I know enough. I know that this bloody quest of yours is about you, not about Jack. You’re trying to redeem yourself. Trying to make up for all the years you wasted. Well you can’t do that, Maude. There’s no going back. And nothing you do, nothing I do, will change the fact that Jack is dead.’
Too many of the plot’s mechanics feel equally clunky. It’s very fortunate that Maude hasn’t tried to contact her brother for 20 years, and also happens to have €100,000 to spare, even though she’s been working in a sheep station in Australia. (We’re given explanations for both – and both are unconvincing.) Elsewhere, there are strange jolts towards the end of the book, as hitherto peripheral characters take over the narrative focus – a decision that only adds to the confusion as there are already too many minor characters flitting about. More crucially (and I hope this isn’t too much of a spoiler), the villain here is absurd. The portrayal is both inconsistent and over-the-top, deflating most of the tension that McTiernan set up so skilfully in the novel’s early pages.
There’s still enough sympathetic writing and talent on display to make you stick with The Ruin, but in the end it feels frustrating and unsatisfying. It turns out that that “what happened next” wasn’t quite as intriguing as that powerful opening.
Next time: Three Dreams in the Key of G by Marc Nash
Last week: Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley
REVIEW - THE RUIN, DERVLA MCTIERNAN
HideBook Cover
HideAuthor Information
Author Name:
Dervla McTiernan
Author's Home Country:
Australia
HidePublication Details
Book Title:
The Ruin
ISBN:
9781460754214
Series:
#1 Cormac Reilly
Year of Publication:
2018
Publisher:
Harper Collins Australia
Publisher Website:
Harper Collins Australia (link is external)
HideCategories & Groupings
Category:
Crime and Mystery
Sub Genre:
Police Procedural
Location:
Ireland
HideBook Synopsis
Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly has moved with his girlfriend to a new town and is once again a newbie in the ranks of the local police branch. Tasked to cast a fresh eye over their cold cases, Cormac is diligently ploughing through the work but is keen to take on something more high profile. It does niggle that he is not tackling anything current and that his new Galway colleagues aren’t that welcoming, but there is at least one friendly face in the office and Cormac knows he must prove his worth once again to a new audience.
When presented with a case file from twenty years ago, Cormac is shocked to realize that as a young and fresh police officer, he was the Garda involved in the original callout. Five year old Jack Blake was placed into foster care and as for the teenage sister Maude, that was the last anyone heard of her after the death of her mother. It saddens Cormac to be told that the body recently found in the local river was that of the now twenty-five year old Jack Blake. Jack’s doctor girlfriend Aisling is in shock over her partner’s death but soon has a new ally to stir things up – the newly returned Maude.
HideBook Review
You’ve heard a fair bit of buzz about this novel? There’s an excellent reason for that! THE RUIN is a ripper of a read and remarkably polished for a debut novel. Additionally, it is impressive as series entries face a much harder task in engaging instantly the fickle minds of crime readers. The series read is (happily) prolific in the crime fiction sphere. There is a huge demand for police procedurals in particular and this rides largely on the strength of that immediacy of engagement with the cast of characters. The reader needs to be sold as quickly as possible, and this is achieved here in THE RUIN with gratifying ease.
THE RUIN is so confidently written with fully rounded characters that we are assured of some great reading from this series in the future. Cormac Reilly is a refreshing change from the rumpled, often archaic male protagonist that we are used to seeing leading our fictional crime investigations. It does feel like the days of encountering that kind of protagonist might be over. The novel does seems a bit over populated perspective wise at times but the dual lead of Aisling and Cormac gives a good balance to the investigation and its corresponding impact on the bereaved left behind.
Launching into this book you might think there had been a series predecessor as it is well threaded with lots of scope for possible future plot points to come. Looking forward to catching up with the cast of THE RUIN soon! Congratulations to us all, here is the newest addition to our stable of favourite crime authors.
Submitted 2 months 3 weeks ago by Andrea Thompson.
Saturday, July 7, 2018 - 11:31am
The Ruin review: Dervla McTiernan's mystery with a dash of gender politics
By Sue Turnbull
6 April 2018 — 9:10am
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Crime fiction
The Ruin
Dervla McTiernan
HarperCollins, $32.99
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan
February 1993, County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, and rookie cop Cormac Reilly has been called out to investigate a "minor domestic". It's freezing, and he's been allocated the "shittiest squad car" in the fleet. As he wrestles the complaining clutch, and hunts in the dark for an address that seems not to exist, Cormac is half persuaded that the whole thing is some sort of first-week hazing ritual initiated by his suspicious new colleagues. Except it isn't, and the tragic scene that awaits in a crumbling Georgian mansion will haunt him for years to come.
Entering the dilapidated house, Cormac is greeted by a composed but under-nourished 15-year-old girl and her much younger brother. Their mother lies in bed, dead of an apparent heroin overdose. It's a grim scenario, but one with which the young Cormac copes with efficiency and kindness, immediately transporting the children to hospital. Here the full extent of the boy's shocking injuries are revealed, and the sister disappears.
Fast forward to 2013, and Cormac, now the former "golden boy" of an elite anti-terrorism squad in Dublin, has retreated to a Galway backwater in order to be closer to his partner, Emma. She is a biologist, totally immersed in her highly prestigious research project, and hardly ever home. It's a nice reversal of the usual gender politics, nor is it the only one.
Another key figure in this complex narrative is Aisling, a young doctor who is working impossible shifts in her bid to become a surgeon. The discovery that she is pregnant precipitates a tense debate with her partner, Jack, about whether or not to keep the child. This being Ireland, the solution is complicated, not least because Jack is keen to be a father. It's a discussion that doesn't end well, and Aisling is devastated when Jack's body is discovered in the river the next day in what appears to be a suicide.
Aisling, however, is not convinced and emerges from her grief to take a proactive role in the investigation, along with Jack's sister Maude. Meanwhile the sidelined Cormac is ploughing through a number of cold-case investigations, including that of the woman in the decaying Georgian mansion so many years ago. Inevitably, their trajectories will intersect.
The Ruin is an accomplished, tightly plotted police procedural by Irish-born author, Dervla McTiernan, who relocated to Australia following the global financial crisis in 2008. It is the first in a series that will feature detective sergeant Cormac Reilly who is somewhat slow to come into focus, not least because McTiernan appears to be equally interested in Aisling and Maude, who are indeed interesting.
It's not until almost page 200, for example, that we find out that Cormac is 1.9 metres tall and weighs 86 kilograms. By any measure, this is a big man who would clearly make an even greater impact if it wasn't for the competition.
While the attention to Aisling and Maude may be a highly strategic move, offering the reader multiple and decidedly female points of view, it tends to distract. What would this crime novel be like written from the point of view of Maude, one wonders? Nevertheless, Cormac is the main man and a sequel is already in the works. He may just grow on us.