I’ve been following the Cormac Riley detective series by Dervla McTiernan since the first book, The Ruin.
Cormac Riley is a middle-aged Irish detective who is married to his work but has a heart of gold. He’s the kind of guy you really want in your corner if you’re ever in trouble.
This story starts with a body being found in a bog. It’s originally thought to be a bog body, (historical remains preserved in peat bog), but the fact that the corpse is wearing underpants is a bit of a giveaway that the murder might be more recent.
This is a really good murder mystery that kept me interested the whole way through. I’ll be honest, I’m mostly in it for the Irish setting. In this series, McTiernan writes gritty murder mysteries about the poorer, rougher and slightly seedy side of life in Ireland. She portrays rural Ireland as quite a grim place. You really feel the cold, you smell the damp and you sense the bleakness of the Irish winters. Her stories feature battlers with few opportunities, and her characters often find themselves in trouble because of their poverty and bad choices.
One of the things Dervla McTiernan does really well is show the moral ambiguity of policing and the limitations of the system. At their core, her books are about how people deal with the trouble that comes their way. Many of her characters are flawed. However, the key difference between the goodies and the baddies, is whether they act to protect the people around them or are only out for themselves.
-Katrina Roe, RRL
