The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan: Review

“In Irish, Rúin means something hidden, a mystery, or a secret, but the word also has a long history as a term of endearment.”

“Twenty years before, he’d walked away from the Blake case, and it had come back to haunt him.”

February 1993: Called out to a “minor domestic incident” at a remote, decrepit old house, the last thing young police officer Cormac Reilly expects to find is a woman dead of a heroin overdose, and two frightened children - five-year-old Jack and his protective fifteen-year-old sister, Maude. After taking the children to safety Cormac has nothing further to do with the case, but he’s never forgotten them.

Twenty years later in 2013, Cormac, now a Detective Sergeant, has returned to Galway - transferring from Dublin due to his girlfriend’s career (and isn’t that a nice change?) - where he’s not being made particularly welcome by some of his new colleagues. Not only that, there’s a distinct whiff of corruption in certain quarters.

Meanwhile, young doctor Aisling Conroy is reeling from the unexpected suicide of her boyfriend Jack... and the reappearance of the sister Jack hasn’t seen for twenty years. Maude is certain Jack didn’t kill himself, and she’s on a mission to prove it.

I had The Ruin on my “shelf” for ages before getting around to reading it, but I wish it hadn’t taken me so long because I thoroughly enjoyed it. I do love a good police procedural and Cormac is a great addition to the ranks of fictional detectives. The plot is gripping, surprising, at times distressing and ultimately very moving - but Dervla McTiernan never goes for the easy resolution. Something which I would’ve put money on happening at the end then didn’t, and I found that quite refreshing.

The Ruin is the first in a series (yay!) but doesn’t feel like it at times; with unexpanded-upon references to Cormac’s past cases and how he met his girlfriend Emma, I had to double check I wasn’t missing out on some continuity. Presumably, we will learn more in future instalments - the relationship with Emma is only briefly touched upon, but I feel sure there’s more to come. Cormac himself is a great and very likeable character, and there are also some excellent female characters - Aisling, Maude and Cormac’s fellow garda Carrie O’Halloran (I liked her a lot).

I’m now very much looking forward to The Scholar, out next year!

The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts: Review

The Flower Girls is a dark, disturbing and really rather haunting story. 

Nearly twenty years ago, the brutal murder of two-year-old Kirstie Swann shocked the nation, not least because the apparent perpetrators, Laurel and Rosie Bowman, were just ten and six years old. Laurel, above the age of criminal responsibility, is tried and convicted of murder, and has remained in custody ever since; her sister, too young to stand trial, moves away with her parents and a new identity.  Still, the public haven’t forgotten the girls dubbed by the press “the Flower Girls” - like other young killers, their names and photographs have become a byword for evil. But nobody knows what really happened that day... because neither Laurel nor Rosie has ever told.

Many years later, Rosie - now known as Hazel, and having successfully rebuilt her life - is staying at a Devon hotel with her boyfriend when another young girl, five-year-old Georgie Greenstreet, goes missing.

It looks like the past is coming back to haunt her.

The story is told from a number of angles - we see Laurel and Rosie/Hazel both then and now, but we also see their story through the eyes of others.

Joanna, the aunt of murdered Kirstie, has diverted her grief into anger, devoting her life to ensuring that her conception of justice is done - for Joanna, that means Laurel’s never getting out of prison, not if she’s got anything to do with it.

Meanwhile, tenacious Detective Constable Lorna Hillier is determined to uncover the truth about what’s happened to Georgie before it’s too late.

Despite the unpleasant subject matter the story is compellingly and sensitively written, forcing the reader to examine notions of guilt, responsibility and retribution, particularly through the character of Joanna. The crying out for vengeance-at-all-costs  of a certain section of the general public is laid bare here during a radio phone-in involving Joanna when one caller remarks that Laurel “should’ve been hanged from the start”. “You’d have hanged a ten-year-old?” enquires the host, causing the caller to quickly backtrack... though only slightly.

There’s a strangely fairytale quality at times about The Flower Girls - but most definitely the darker kind. There’s nothing cosy or comforting here. And the ending is truly unexpected and horrifying. 

An excellent read but with some dark and difficult themes.

Book review: Pulp by Robin Talley

I loved Robin Talley’s previous books and as soon as I read the synopsis for this I knew it was so far up my street that I was desperate to read it. A novel dealing with the lesbian pulps of the 1950s? Yes please! The genre was a fascinating one and with Robin Talley I knew it would be in safe hands.

The books, with their lurid titles and covers, were marketed as titillation (many, though by no means all, were written by straight men and were pretty bad) but the better ones often meant a great deal to women who discovered them and saw, perhaps for the first time, that they were not alone in their feelings. Unfortunately the “morality” of the time precluded happy endings for the lesbian characters, who almost invariably ended up dying or turning straight - exceptions were few and far between. A lot of the books referred to are real (including, believe it or not, Satan Was a Lesbian).

Anyway, in the present day seventeen-year-old Abby, struggling after her breakup with girlfriend Linh and difficulties between her parents at home, discovers and is quickly captivated by the strange world of 1950s lesbian pulp novels, in particular one called Women of the Twilight Realm by the mysterious Marian Love, who apparently only published one novel and promptly disappeared. Abby becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Marian... 

Many years earlier in 1955, another young woman, Janet, is equally captivated by A Love So Strange, the novel she stumbled upon at a bus station bookstall, seeing in it a much-needed recognition of her own feelings for her friend Marie. But times are far more dangerous for Janet than for out-and-proud twenty-first-century Abby.

The hysterically repressive political climate of the McCarthyist 1950s is very well evoked and it was fascinating (and terrifying) to read about the measures taken against anyone who was suspected of, well, anything, particularly anything communist-y or gay-y. At one point a female character comes under suspicion because “her voice is too low” - that’s the level of absurdity people were dealing with. Although clearly far too young to remember any of it, Robin Talley has definitely done her research (Senator Hunt was a real person for instance).

There are lots of nods to real writers of that and other times - Bannon Press is clearly a reference to writer Ann, perhaps the best known of the lesbian pulp authors, and I felt Claire Singer’s name was a reference to the pseudonym under which Patricia Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt, Claire Morgan. (Also the Sheldon Lounge - Alice Sheldon?) I’m sure there were many I missed.

I thought I knew where the plot was going in terms of what happened to Janet, but as it turned out, I was barking up an entirely wrong tree and the outcome was a big surprise. Let’s just say I did one character a major disservice.

For me this book entirely lived up to its promise - I loved it.

Pulp can be preordered here.