Cormac Reilly is about to reopen the case that took him twenty years to forget … The stunning debut novel from your new favourite crime writer.
Responding to a call that took him to a decrepit country house, young Garda Cormac Reilly found two silent, neglected children – fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack. Their mother lay dead upstairs.
Since then Cormac’s had twenty high-flying years working as a detective in Dublin, and he’s come back to Galway for reasons of his own. As he struggles to navigate the politics of a new police station, Maude and Jack return to haunt him.
What ties a recent suicide to that death from so long ago? And who among his new colleagues can Cormac really trust?
Betrayal is at the heart of this unsettling small-town noir and the Ireland it portrays. In a country where the written law isn’t the only one, The Rúin asks who will protect you when the authorities can’t – or won’t.
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The good news is that the sequel is already in the pipeline.
The bad news is that it isn’t going to be released until March, 2019. Sigh…
It’s a very engrossing book for an experienced author, let alone a debut novel. The hero of the novel, Cormac Reilly, is a fairly senior detective in the anti-terrorist unit in the big city of Dublin, who realises that the elite unit is about to be considerably downsized, and applies for a transfer to the small town of Galway, partly to accompany his partner, who has been awarded a 3 million Euro grant to lead a research project.
He’s assigned to lead the cold case investigation unit. He’s worried that even after a month in the new job, his colleagues treat him as a pariah. Even an old friend’s behaviour worries him. And then his superior assigns a 20 year old death for him to investigate. One he investigated in his first week as a policeman, and recommended that it ought to be investigated further, but was told that to bury it.
The author introduces Google Timeline as an anachronism in order to advance the plot (the novel was set in 2013, and Timeline was introduced in 2015) because, as the author notes in the afterword, she needed some way for one of the characters to track the movements of her partner before he’d been murdered (and declared, wrongly, by the police to have committed suicide). And being able to find his iPhone on a walking track in a National Park.
I’m not certain whether that would have worked. I have been trying Timeline for the past few days (albeit on an iPod ), and today it had me walking to the middle of Lake Monger in Perth despite actually being on a train 500 metres to the East.
It’s a very good read.