4★“Money didn’t keep you safe, she’d known that since she was a little girl. Without position, status, power, protection, what was she but just another pretty girl, floating around Cannes or Marbella?”Carline was beautiful, rich, and smart. So smart she was working on her thesis at her grandfather’s renowned laboratory where our Emma was headhunted to work. Emma’s the girlfriend of our Cormac, handsome Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly of the Irish Garda (police) who moved from Dublin to Galway w 4★“Money didn’t keep you safe, she’d known that since she was a little girl. Without position, status, power, protection, what was she but just another pretty girl, floating around Cannes or Marbella?”Carline was beautiful, rich, and smart. So smart she was working on her thesis at her grandfather’s renowned laboratory where our Emma was headhunted to work. Emma’s the girlfriend of our Cormac, handsome Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly of the Irish Garda (police) who moved from Dublin to Galway with her when she was offered the great position at the lab. She’s another smart, beautiful girl (but not rich, no).Reilly’s been stuck following up cold cases until now, and not allowed out on active investigations. He’s treated with suspicion as an outsider and misses his old job. But when Emma stumbles across a dead body outside her lab late one night, she calls him directly, and voilá! He’s right in the middle of a very active crime scene indeed. A crime, because the girl was obviously an intentional hit-and-run victim.Ought he be involved? After all, it’s his girlfriend who discovered the body. He explains (rationalises) that Emma’s just an innocent bystander who happened to be the first on the scene. Nothing to see here. I’m not conflicted. Someone else can please interview her and then take her out of the picture. By the way, Emma had a terrible time with violence in the past and is still shaky, so be gentle with her. (Does he sound not conflicted?)We learn more about her violent past and then – horror of horrors – it seems Emma may have been more connected to the victim than we thought. Maybe Cormac is conflicted after all. I like McTiernan’s characters. Her stories are about people, connections, and behaviour more than they are about time and place. Of course it’s still cold and wet – this is Ireland, after all – but this shows how Cormac’s relationship develops with the other garda and with Emma. That’s not to say McTiernan isn’t descriptive, because she certainly is. Here is a lacklustre witness and her sister. “Lucy Henderson opened the door to them with a baby in her arms and milk stains on her shoulder. She was a bird-like little woman. Petite and fine-boned and with a definite air of abstraction . . . The second woman looked very like Lucy, but sharper somehow, more robust, as if Lucy was an artist’s rough pencil sketch, and the second woman was the finished picture.”Part way through the story, I was disappointed that the lovely, personable Dervla McTiernan had written such a simple mystery that I had figured it out already and was just going to watch all the pieces fall into place. Ooops. I should have known better, of course. It was quite a satisfying result.I enjoyed Carrie, another detective sergeant, who’s carrying a heavy workload of active cases and trying to balance that with a young family. She can see how wasted Cormac’s talents are on cold cases, successful though he may be, so why can’t he take some of hers over? And I liked Peter Fisher, whom Cormac calls away from his PlayStation to assist. He turns out to be more useful and astute than Cormac or we imagine. Cormac is not hardened, but I’d say he’s seasoned. He’s dealt with bad stuff before. Interviewing someone, he hears:“‘I hadn’t heard that she was young. I don’t know why but that somehow makes it worse, doesn’t it?’ Cormac thought about all the houses he’d visited where Mummy or Daddy, or on one awful occasion both, hadn’t come home, and felt he couldn’t agree.”He also knows the personal toll that is taken by the job, by guilt, and by trauma. He wonders if he could have prevented something, Emma wonders if she could have prevented something, both worry about the price their relationship may take after all is said and done. Cormac gives her his view about feeling guilty.“‘But here’s the thing, Em. That way lies madness. That way lies a drink problem, and early retirement, and me propping up a bar somewhere with the other men and women the job has chewed up and spat out, and then what the hell good am I to anyone? You have to let it go, right? You have to do the best you can, and let the rest go. And if you’re angry, if you’re guilty, you have to shove all that into the work, into your next case, so that next time you don’t make those mistakes.’ He let out a shaky, hard laugh. ‘Maybe you make new ones, but you try.’”Now I’m waiting for next time and the inevitable new mistakes! :)Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted.If you’d like to hear the delightful Dervla herself, I can recommend this recent “Better Reading” podcast interview. By golly, she’s been through a lot, and we’re glad she’s enjoying a sunny life in Western Australia while writing about her homeland of cold, wet Ireland.https://omny.fm/shows/better-reading-...P.S. You can enjoy this as a stand-alone. There's no crucial information or even background story that you need to know to follow the plot or the relationship.
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