The Good Turn
This book is third in a series featuring Irish police detective Cormac Reilly, but it can easily be read as a standalone, without reading the earlier books.
At the outset we’re introduced to Anna, an impoverished single mother living in Dublin, whose young daughter Tilly has recently fallen mute. Ahead of an investigation by social services suspecting Tilly’s been abused, Anna and Tilly leave the city by bus.
Meanwhile in Galway, a smaller city on the west coast of Ireland, a twelve-year-old girl has been abducted. Detective Reilly is facing a time crunch to find and save her, but his boss refuses to allocate him the additional officers he needs, claiming they’re all required for a high profile drug task force. Cormac is forced to investigate the abduction with a skeleton team of three detectives.
Against all odds, this lean team identifies a likely suspect, but the investigation ends badly. Cormac is suspended from duty, and one of his other officers, Peter Fisher, is banished to the village of Roundstone, where he’s assigned to work under his estranged father—one of two local police officers in the village.
Peter’s mother died some years ago in Roundstone, and his grandmother is still living there. When Peter visits her he discovers she is ill, needing caretaking. And there’s a young woman doing that caretaking. This is where we once again meet Anna and Tilly.
The drug task force has finally made a major breakthrough, but Cormac suspects police corruption. There’s not much he can do about it, though. And Emma, his longtime girlfriend, has moved to Brussels and wants him to relocate as well.
The plot gets even more convoluted, but there is more to this book than plot. The lead characters are rounded individuals, evoking our sympathies as they deal with circumstances and with each other. The story lines that seem separate end up converging, leading to a final satisfying climax.
I loved the book and am going to read the previous ones in the series. I’d like to see the series continue, though so far, at least, the author has not announced plans for another sequel.
Dervla McTiernan was born in Ireland in 1977. The middle child in a family of seven, she attended school and university in Galway, graduating with a law degree. She practiced corporate law for twelve years, first in Dublin and then in Galway.
When the global financial crisis of 2008 devastated the Irish economy, she and her civil engineer husband decided they needed a new start. In 2011 they moved to Australia with their two-year-old daughter; their son was born five weeks later. Her husband landed an engineering job right away, and Dervla got a part-time job with the Australian Mental Health Commission.
She had been a reader since childhood, and always wanted to write, but hadn’t thought being a writer was realistic. But in 2014 she decided to give herself a chance. She took writing courses, devoured books about the craft of writing, and analyzed the writing techniques of her favourite writers. She committed to writing for two hours a day after the children were in bed. In 2015 she submitted a short story to the Scarlet Stiletto competition run by Sisters in Crime Australia, and made the shortlist. That gave her the confidence to plow ahead on the manuscript that became her first novel, The Ruin.
That novel —the first to feature Detective Cormac Reilly—became the object of a hotly contested publishing auction. Published in 2018, it quickly shot to the top of the Australian bestselling charts and won several awards. Two more novels in the series followed: The Scholar (2019) and The Good Turn (2020). She also wrote two short prequel novellas, The Sisters and The Roommate, which appeared only as audiobooks.
The Murder Rule, McTiernan’s first standalone novel, appeared in May 2022. She and her family live in Perth, Australia, where she is working on her next book, said to be another standalone.
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