The Ruin

Author/Guide: Dervla McTiernan

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Cormac Reilly is about to reopen a case it took him twenty years to forget

ISBN: 978-0751569308
Genre: Crime, Police Procedural

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

On his first week on the job, Garda Cormac Reilly responds to a call at a decrepit country house to find two silent, neglected children waiting for him – fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack. Their mother lies dead upstairs.

Twenty years later, Cormac has left his high-flying career as a detective in Dublin and returned to Galway. As he struggles to navigate the politics of a new police station, Maude and Jack return to haunt him.

What ties a recent suicide to the woman’s death so long ago? And who among his new colleagues can Cormac really trust?

Locations

Reset

Travel Guide

Galway

Cormac Reilly now works in the busy city of Galway having moved from Dublin, but the case in Mayo still haunts him. From the garda station on Mill Street to the drugs agency tucked away in Dublin castle, this is a city of contrasts and shadows.

They walked as quickly as the busy footpaths and heavy traffic would allow – Galway was a city of narrow streets and complicated on-way systems. When it rained it sometimes felt like the whole place came to a halt.

Summer’s not much better either apparently:

EyreSquare: it wasn’t much of a public space, just a postage stamp-sized park with a bit of lawn and a few trees around the margins. The square didn’t look much in winter, but in the short Galway summer, it could be pretty enough.

This is the small town community Cormac now works in and serves and the contrasts between the city and Galway are evocatively drawn.

The house in Mayo where it all began:

Where the book opens and where the case which still haunts the Garda 20 years later, takes place. Two children left home alone with their alcoholic mother dead upstairs. The house is down a dirt track, in the middle of nowhere. The house is falling apart, everything inside and out in disarray or disrepair.

What did happen to this family?

Booktrailer Review

Susan: @thebooktrailer

A first novel, first in a series and a great one to start your new Irish fiction obsession with. A Garda agent who’s moved from Dublin to Galway is working cases but finds that one which has troubled him for more than 20 years is once again back on the table.

Things have changed so Cormac is able to start a bit of digging. Trouble is when you start digging, that hole gets bigger and things buried come to the surface. It’s a nicely slow burner of a novel which gets you all fired up as to what is going to come to the fore, who knew what, what really happened is chipped away bit by bit. A man carving a block of concrete sees bit chipped off all the time, the shape of something taking place but it’s not until the chipping has stopped, until you stand back, that you really see what’s been carved up…and that’s quite the work of art!

Great characters populate Galway. Cormac and Emma (why did he move from Dublin?) to Jack and Aisling. Wanted to be part of that police team in Galway Garda station to be honest.

There’s a lot going on in this novel – Irish intrigue and the history of the church. Plus a very interesting use of the power of the internet.

Bring on book two!