Ebook The Ruin A Novel Dervla McTiernan Books

Product details Paperback 400 pages Publisher Penguin Books (July 3, 2018) Language English ISBN-10 0143133128

The Ruin A Novel Dervla McTiernan Books Reviews

• I wanted to like this book. But long story short (no pun intended), I didn’t. I fully understand that police investigations are slow in real life, and that things take time. But this a book and it is fiction (aka for entertainment purposes), and I wanted something with a little more pace, more action, and more intrigue. Mostly, I just persevered reading The Ruin because I wanted to know how it ended. But by the time I got to the ending not only was I not that surprised, but also found myself not caring that much because it had seemed like a lot of hard work to get to the end. Cormac as a main character was just depressingly dull. His character was supposed to be a really smart, really on-the-ball detective but in this particular case he seemed completely at a loss most of the time and couldn’t put the pieces together until the book was nearly over. I’m sad (not really) to say that I probably won’t be purchasing the next book in the series when it comes out. If you like the review, follow me on Instagram - @girlybook.nerd for more!
• The opening chapter of this book starts out strong with a rookie Irish policeman, Cormac, being called to a derelict country house to investigate a domestic call. Inside, Cormac finds a young girl and her younger brother living in squalor and to his horror, their dead mother with a needle sticking out of her arm. Years later, Cormac has the chance to revisit his initial investigation, only this time evaluating it as a murder rather than a drug overdose. He again finds himself in a new situation having moved to a different squad and having to figure out the office politics.
  
  The story has an intricate plot and many characters, so many, in fact, that I had to flip back pages to keep them straight. This confusion on my part took me out of the story somewhat. I also found the second half of the novel dragged a little, but it did deliver an exciting climax. Overall, this is a good police/procedural/mystery that is best read in a few sittings rather than in interrupted readings.
• Garda Cormac Reilly is sent on call to what he believed to be a minor domestic disturbance. What he finds instead is a dilapidated home with two young children Maude and Jack Blake and their dead mother. Jack has suffered injuries and their mother appears to have committed suicide by way of a heroin overdose. Cormac takes the children to the hospital but Maude disappears without a trace. 20 years later when Jack Blake is found dead, an apparent suicide, Maude resurfaces claiming he was murdered. Detective Reilly must piece together the evidence that links the two cases...his instincts tell him there is something much larger at stake.
  
  The Ruin is a compelling mystery set in Ireland which intertwines two separate crimes committed across a 20 year span. Detective Reilly's instincts tell him there is more to these two cases than the apparent suicide. Cormac's character has some history which followed him from Dublin to the small town of Galway. Galway has a history as well and there are rumors of corruption within the force making Cormac's job more difficult. This novel was and engaging read which I enjoyed over a leisurely few days. I was very excited to see that this is the first book in the Cormac Reilly series and am looking forward to reading the future novels in this series.
• I am sick and tired of authors these days using profanity as a writing tool. I realize people cuss, but not normally to the extent that writers tend to use it in their books. And if someone does cuss that much, I have nothing to do with them. So I will have nothing to do with Authors who use it profusely in their books.
• 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.