The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

At first I was intrigued by the prologue featuring young Garda Cormac Reilly who—after answering a call out—is faced with his first dead body and two neglected children. The rest of the book, which is set years later and follows a newly transferred to Galway Reilly, was markedly less engaging. Maybe readers who haven’t read a lot of crime fiction might be able to enjoy this one more than I did.

Reilly’s new department and colleagues do not provide the warmest of welcomes, and he finds himself being mostly assigned to cold cases (would a department really waste such a high-flying detective?). By ‘chance’ he has to look back into his own case (the one featuring at the beginning of this book) which happens to be connected to the death of Aisling Conroy’s boyfriend Jack. Although McTiernan emphasises how good Reilly is at his job, as the story progresses, I had the impression that he makes a really bad detective. In spite of his years of service he lets himself be intimidated by some of his greener colleagues (who are the typical chauvinist, possibly crook, police bullies), and repeatedly fails to pick up on the odd behaviour of another character.
The story also follows Aisling, as she tries to reconcile herself with the possibility that Jack was not as happy as he seemed, and her full-on job as a surgical resident. When Jack’s estranged sister appears out of the blue, Aisling begins to question wherever Jack’s death was a suicide.

The book tries to include many different topics and themes, but it does so in such a rushed manner that not one of them felt particularly well explored.
The storyline lacked interesting suspects or suspense, consisting instead in a monotone narrative featuring a bland, apparently good-at-his-job protagonist, his chauvinistic, lazy, possibly sadistic male colleagues, his no-nonsense ambitious young female colleagues (who I found incredibly unsympathetic), and conveniently evil characters…
Maybe if the plot had provided me with some more engaging material I could have looked past the thin-as-paper characters…towards the end there are two plot points which really annoyed me: one which seemed a cheap solution to what had until then been a genuine portrayal of the difficult reality of abortion in Ireland; the other was the classic—and obvious—reveal (view spoiler)[that the killer is a sociopath… (hide spoiler)].
Rather than Tana French, this reminded me ofClose to Home : the type of detective stories that provide little insight in the human psyche, presenting us instead with a narrative chock full of unlikely—and unbelievable—coincides, a dichotomous depiction of good and bad, and a series of poorly explored discussions (on child abuse, abortion, pedophilia, extenuating working conditions for residents and social workers, police corruption, alcoholism, biological family vs. adoption, and the list goes on and on).
Cormac Reilly could have been an interesting character but he was forgettable and incompetent…which is why I won’t be picking up the next instalment of this series.

My rating: ★★★✰✰ 3 just-about-stars

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