Val Mc Dermid’s comment ‘A born storyteller’ aptly sums up Dervla McTiernan’s ability to create a pacey and tension-filled story with engaging and memorable characters. The Good Turn is the third novel in the Detective Cormac Reilly series and in this one, Cormac, placed in a Garda station under a seemingly inept supervisor and colleagues who resent him, must investigate the abduction of a young girl without the back up he desperately needs. A mistake is made, Cormac is suspended and his protegee Peter Fisher is sent off to work under his dominating father at the Roundstone Garda station.
Cormac is a highly engaging character and the reader is with him all the way as he sets out to investigate for himself the corruption that he suspects lies within the Garda itself. The plot has twists and turns and surprises and is wonderfully complex in its weaving of Peter and Cormac’s personal stories with the girl’s disappearance, the corruption that lies beneath the Galway Garda and the story of Annie and her daughter Tilly- a child, so traumatised she is unable to speak - now living in Roundstone.
I really enjoyed Dervla Mc Tiernan’s previous Cormac Reilly novels, The Ruin and The Scholar and this is equally good. Mc Tiernan’s writing is vivid and taut and her stories powerful. I’m hoping there will be more in this series to come.
Reviewer: Paddy Richardson
HarperCollins