Review: The Ruin

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am definitely getting a bit jaded with police procedurals, so this did an excellent job of actually keeping me entertained throughout.

The plot involves a few different crimes which are naturally all tangled up to keep you guessing. It always bothers me a bit, because it's hard to keep track of which characters refer to which cases (I legit kept wondering who the heck Maura was, especially since her name was so similar to Maude's) and you know that somehow the strangeness of the cop's personal life (including relationship with other cops) is always somehow tangled up with the case.

I guess the reason this novel still worked for me, though, was how it was tricky to puzzle out the connections. I knew everything was somehow connected, but spent most of the book wondering how.

It was also mercifully light on with the personal stuff, which does nothing for me at all.

The plot moved nice and fast, and the alternating viewpoints of Cormac, Aisling and Maude mixed things up a bit and made it more interesting. The Irish names and terms were a bit beyond me, but that's a cultural thing more than anything, I think. I had no idea how to pronounce half of them haha

All in all, an interesting, refreshing sort of crime novel. It's obviously building for a series with the scant personal details, but there's a lot of promise in the storytelling. I'd be interested in reading the second, just to see how it compares.

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