Dervla McTiernan

'The Murder Rule' is a standalone thriller that hooked me from the first page and never let go. Most of the story is told from two intercut first-person accounts: a present-day narrative from Hannah Rokeby a third-year law student at the University of Maine who lives with her often drunk single mother Laura, and the contents of her mother's journal, covering events in the summer before Hannah was born.

From the beginning, we know that Hannah has inveigled her way onto an Innocence Project show more team at a university in Virginia, so she can covertly sabotage the defence they are building for a man Hannah knows to be guilty.

The focus is initially on how Hannah embeds herself in the team and gains their trust, Meanwhile, via Laura's journal, the events that motivate Hannah's mission are revealed in. Both accounts feel intimate and immediate and they both involve deception and betrayal.

Hannah lies constantly to everyone around her and does whatever it takes to get on to the team managing the defence that she wants to sabotage. Laura's tale moves from one of a casual summer fling to something laced with menace and ending in violence.

Once the scene is set, the pace of the present-day story accelerates, building tension and uncertainty and adding an amount of violence that was surprising in what I'd expected to be a courtroom drama.

What I liked most about the book was the way my understanding of what was going on kept changing. I knew I was likely to be dealing with an unreliable narrator but that didn't help me to decide how much of which narrative to believe, especially when I fell victim to my own confirmation bias. I admired Dervla McTierney's ability to deliver that perception shift without making me feel tricked and while feeding my need to know what was going to happen next.

I enjoyed being constantly caught by surprise. I also found the main characters easy to relate to and care about, which made the story mean more than just solving a puzzle.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'The Murder Rule' because the story is made even more engaging by the use of different narrators for Hannah's and Laura's stories. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample. show less

I read this book in part because of a positive review in the Wall Street Journal (which I trust enough to make it one of my two regular daily newspapers) and a positive blurb from Don Winslow whose work I really adore. I am now questioning the judgement of those foolishly trusted sources.

I am going to say that Dervla McTiernan did a grand total of . . . zero minutes of research for this book. Unless you count binge-watching Suits. She got wrong everything about the law and about American show more education. It is absurd. At first I castigated myself for over-thinking. I am a former lawyer and I now work in a law school (the action here happens at University of Virginia Law) so I come to this book with a bank of knowledge others readers don't have. It is why I enjoyed watching Grey's Anatomy for a time (I know nothing about medicine or hospitals) but could not make it through a single episode of How To Get Away With Murder. Then I read more, and I realized that anyone with access to popular television or movies or Court Cam over the last 20 years would know how off base McTiernan is with most of this. Also, taking out my specialized knowledge, the writing here is really bad (especially Laura's diary, which is a large portion of the text.) Even if you overlook that pretty much everything that happens in the book could not and/or would not happen, under any circumstances, this is just poorly crafted.

Let's start with the setup. Hannah is a 3L at University of Maine law school which is ranked 114th in the country. If you are wondering, that is not great. She shows up at the Innocence Project office at the University of Virginia saying she had just transferred from U of Maine to UVA because her mother is undergoing cancer treatment in Richmond. Do people think that could happen? That you can simply transfer to one of the best law schools in the country (#8 if you are keeping score) from University of Maine? I would have put my dad into the hospital in New Haven when I was in law school if this were a thing. My dad was actually ill but I would have likely resorted to some Munchausen's-by-Proxy if he were not if this were possible. Yale baby! No one, absolutely no one to whom she told this story at UVA would have believed her. Not students or faculty or staff. When the reader sees this they know Hannah is either lying and not enrolled, or that Dervla McTiernan did no research, or both.

Hannah walks into the Innocence Project clinic at the school and dazzles the Clinical Prof with her 2 years at the 114th best law school in the nation and with her chutzpah. You see, initially he won't talk to her. Then she not so subtlety threatens him with her supposed knowledge of an affair he had with a student. He laughs off the blackmail attempt saying he was not this student's professor so the school is fine with the dating, and invites her to join the Innocence Project team. First, the Innocence Project clinic is incredibly prestigious. It takes the best and the brightest students and the application process is very competitive. The whim of a Clinical Prof is not going to cut it. Also, professors at UVA cannot date students, regardless of whether they are in their classes. You know how long it took me to fact check that. about 12 seconds. Ms. McTiernan, lets sit down and I will tell you about a thing called Google. You are gonna love it. Second, blackmail attempts are not looked at as an appealing behavior in law school. I feel confident saying it is an honor code violation at every academic institution (though I have never had a student try to blackmail me so I have not looked it up) and would result in expulsion. Everything I have mentioned so far happens in the first 30 pages of the book. It gets worse.

There is a bunch of stuff on the Felony Murder Rule. McTiernan gets her initial description of the rule mostly right, but the rest is a mess. First, she keeps calling it the "Murder Rule." No one has ever called it that before. It doesn't even make sense. Second, lawyers and law students would never say "the Felony Murder Rule applies here" they would say "are they charging felony murder?" or something like that. And since they would have known within a couple of weeks of starting a crim law class what the rule is (if they did not know it from tv shows before that) no law student would feel compelled to explain what felony murder is to another 2L or 3L (no 1L's in the clinic) let alone to a PROFESSOR! Its nuts. But the biggest thing, the wackiest thing, is that the Felony Murder Rule has nothing at all to do with the case in the book. Why is everyone talking about it? We have no idea.

There are 100 other things wrong with this. Ex: someone explains to everyone in a crim law clinic what happens at a preliminary hearing. If they don't know that before they are on the eve of said hearing many people need to be fired. Ex: There is a really important hearing on a Monday for which everyone is unprepared. On Friday the person running the case says "take the weekend off. Relax!" I seriously started giggling when I typed that. This is not how lawyers roll. I worked a trial as first year where I did not sleep for more than a handful of 30 minute catnaps for three days before trial began. Ex: people casually drive from Virginia to Maine to help out a friend who wants to have a 10 minute face to face critical conversation and then drive back. That is a 10+ hour drive each way. (Again, 12 seconds on Google.) Maine and Virginia are in fact both in the US, but a glance at a map will tell you there are A LOT of states in between, like 10. Ex: people refer to "summer internships" in large law firms. They are called Summer Associate programs -- internships are different. Ex: Hannah's mother refers to herself several times as a "cleaner." We don't use that term in the US. She is a maid or a housekeeper (especially 25 years ago that would be true.) But in the interest of time I just want to focus on the most egregious legal errors. I don't want to spoil so I will just say that in a courtroom lawyers can't just accuse witnesses of things, "isn't it true you stole candy from babies!" No. You have to lay a foundation that allows you to introduce evidence, you need to introduce it properly, you need to defend its relevance, you need to show a chain of custody. (The book refers to a chain of title for the evidence-- unless they are buying a used car that is not something they need to worry about.) Also, if someone commits a felony to procure evidence that evidence IS INADMISSIBLE. And if someone gets evidence illegally and that evidence points to other evidence, it too is INADMISSIBLE. And if someone commits a felony to get evidence, even if it is for a good reason, that person is guilty of a felony (ask Edward Snowden.) There is no backslap. The only slapping is the slapping on of cuffs.

I am stunned at how bad this was. I kept reading because I felt like it was so bad she must have had a plan to bring everything together and explain why there was this horrible diary that read like no diary ever, and why nothing plausible happens, and why I know more about every student's coffee order (lots of sugar for some reason) than about the facts of the central case. And she did bring it all together, and it was more absurd and implausible than it was before she brought it together.

Okay, done for now because it is 1:50 in the morning and I want to go to bed, but I could write a book on this book. show less

Not so much a whodunnit, or even a howdunnit, What Happened to Nina? is a nail-biting suspense thriller about whether money and privilege is enough to buy a guilty person an ‘innocent’ verdict.

Nina Fraser is a devoted sister, a conscientious daughter, a loyal friend, and a loving girlfriend; Nina Fraser is a bitch, an unreliable worker, a risk-taking addict, and an unfaithful lover. Whichever version you believe, one thing is certain: Nina Fraser is gone. When Nina’s boyfriend Simon is show more implicated in her disappearance, his influential parents go into overdrive, using expensive lawyers and an unscrupulous PR firm to initiate a vicious media campaign to discredit Nina’s family and cast doubt on Simon’s guilt. As the police attempt to wade through the quagmire of disinformation, Nina’s family realise that to find the answers they need, they might have to start breaking some rules of their own.

I tore through What Happened to Nina? at a rate of knots: alternately on the edge of my seat with anxiety, burning with injustice, and desperate to know how the story of Nina’s disappearance could possibly be resolved. For a crime novel with no red herrings, no twists, and no huge reveals, it’s an electrifying read about what happens when a case is tried in the court of public opinion.

I fucking loved this story! Sensational. Captivating. Heart-pounding. Brilliant. show less

There is a lot here that ought to work for me: a body lifted from a bog, the unsettling suggestion of ritual, and Cormac Reilly caught between a high-pressure investigation and a personal call for help. Dervla McTiernan still writes with that clean, brisk confidence that makes her Cormac books so readable, and, on a scene-by-scene level, I rarely felt bored.

That slightly acid note of humour is something I usually enjoy in these novels, and it is here, too, tucked into conversations and show more reactions rather than delivered as showy one-liners. The problem is that the larger shape of the book never quite gels for me. The central case keeps switching gears in ways that feel more like plot-management than accumulation, and the tension leaks away whenever the narrative turns aside for threads that do not pay their weight.

The bog-body premise has a fantastic, sickly pull, and I liked how the novel toys with the reader’s expectations: archaeological curiosity, then something altogether more recent and messy. But the serial-killer-style escalation never becomes the kind of tightening noose I want from this sort of procedural. Too often, I felt I was being steered, rather than convinced, and the investigation’s turns did not always feel like the inevitable consequences of good police work.

In particular, the Emma strand landed as a distraction. I understand what it is meant to do, press on Cormac’s loyalties, and complicate his focus, but it never felt integrated into the novel’s best momentum, and I resented how often it pulled the story off the more interesting path.

Compared with police procedurals that make their procedural detail feel like texture rather than homework, this one sometimes seems to be hurrying from beat to beat, relying on escalation instead of inevitability. And compared with McTiernan’s earlier Cormac Reilly novels I have read, it left me disappointed. “The Ruin” had a rawer emotional hook, “The Scholar” felt tighter in its moral pressure, and “The Good Turn”, while not perfect, carried its internal politics with more purpose. “The Unquiet Grave” is not bad, but it feels less sure-footed, and, for a fourth entry, I wanted it to feel sharper, not looser.

What I did appreciate is that, when it commits to the human cost, families, reputations, the quiet damage that lasts longer than the headlines, it can still hit with real weight. There are moments where Cormac’s steadiness, and his wary compassion, remind me why I like him as a series lead: he notices what people are not saying, and he does not posture. I just wish the book had trusted that core more, and trimmed the parts that felt like wheel-spinning.

Three stars out of five.

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