Title: THE MURDER RULE
Author: Dervla McTiernan
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Read: February 2022
Expected publication: 4 May 2022
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
First Rule: Make them like you.
Second Rule: Make them need you.
Third Rule: Make them pay.
They think I’m a young, idealistic law student, that I’m passionate about
reforming a corrupt and brutal system.
They think I’m working hard to impress them.
They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row.
They're wrong. I’m going to bury him.
What attracted me to this book:
Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly
books are one of my favourite crime series, so I was excited to hear that the
author had a new stand-alone book coming out this year. I love a good legal
thriller, too, so this sounded like the perfect story for me.
My musings:
Hannah Rokeby is a law student with her own agenda
– to avenge a great injustice done to her mother before Hannah was born. Ever
since she discovered her mother’s diary, Hannah has been determined to bring
the perpetrator to justice. The opportunity presents itself when the Innocent
Project at the University of Virginia takes on the case of Michael Dandridge,
who is in prison for allegedly raping and murdering a young woman. Wrongfully incarcerated,
according to the project’s founder, Professor Rob Parekh and Michael himself,
who keeps proclaiming his innocence.
With ingenuity and some cunning, Hannah makes certain that she is
included in the team investigating the case – but she is following her own
agenda.
With Hannah’s thirst for revenge
disclosed early in the story, I soon became invested to find out more: what,
why and how? I’m usually not a great fan of diary entries as POV, but in this
case they worked well to give motive to Hannah’s quest. With her background as
a lawyer, the author presents us with an intriguing premise that worked well
for me for the first ¾ of the book. Sadly, the last ¼ lost a lot of
credibility, with many unanswered questions remaining in the end. Whilst I could
understand Hannah’s motives (despite the troubled relationship she had with her
mother), some of the other characters seemed to be driven by agendas that were
never fully explained, and I was left feeling like I had overlooked some
crucial bit of information that tied it all together. Whilst the action ramped
up nicely in the final chapters, it did so at the expense of believability,
both regarding the last courtroom scenes as well as character development of
some of the secondary players. This may have all been excused if I had
understood the prime motivations, but as I came to the end, I was scratching my
head in puzzlement and flicking back to earlier chapters to see what I had
missed.
Summary:
It’s difficult to rate a book that initially had me
glued to the pages, but left me feeling disappointed with the final reveal. I
still love McTiernan’s writing style but feel that the character development
here was nowhere as convincing as in her Cormac Reilly series and in some parts
appeared stereotypical to me (which Cormac Reilly definitely was not). One of
the things I always loved about McTiernan’s previous novels was that they
offered something unique in terms of characters and setting, whilst this one
seemed a bit like your run of the mill American law enforcement novel. Whilst
the concept of THE MURDER RULE was intriguing and it was entertaining enough,
it didn’t have the same impact on me as the Cormac Reilly series and I would
love to see the author return to her Irish settings or perhaps an Australian
one in future.
Thank
you to Netgalley and HarperCollins Publishers Australia for the free electronic
copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest
review.
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