I discovered Dervla McTiernan through a picky fellow reader on the Facebook page “What Should I Read Next?” She had asked for recommendations for mystery series, but then dismissed about a third of them as not what she was looking for. When I recommended a few to her, we discovered we were both fans of Tana French, and she then mentioned McTiernan to me.

I don’t want to damn with faint praise here: I don’t feel like the comparison with French is justified, but I feel like it could be, with a few more books under her belt. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed this debut novel, and will read whatever else is available, which I believe to be only one or two other books.

The lead, Cormac Reilly, is in the midst of a career transition: He has apparently made something of a name for himself in Dublin, but now his partner, Emma, has received a substantial research grant tied to an exciting new job in Galway, and he has agreed to a transfer to their police department so he can go with her. This is a bit of a demotion for him, but he didn’t perceive it as a serious one until he was in place in the Galway station and discovered he was being relegated to working by himself on cold cases. There is only one person on the force he thinks of as a friend, and that officer, too, is currently being ostracized by the rest of the squad. His new colleagues are not welcoming, and it goes beyond the usual hazing of the new guy. There are undercurrents of unease, and some of the officers seem to spend as much time disrupting investigations as they do pursuing them. The total lack of support and cooperation are beginning to get to Cormac, and at a couple of points he feels like he is being deliberately set up, without a clue as to why that would be.

The mystery unites a case from his past with one in the present day: A man has died, presumably by jumping off a bridge in an act of suicide, but his sister and, latterly, his girlfriend don’t believe he would have done it and wish the police to look into the possibility of foul play. The officer in charge of the investigation proves strangely reluctant to do so, and the man’s relatives amp up their protests as a result. Then Cormac is roped in with a cold case that causes him to be in the position of looking at the sister as the possible murderer of her own mother. Cormac is familiar with the case because as a rookie he was sent out on a supposed domestic violence call, only to discover a mother dead of a heroin overdose and two children—Maude, 15, and Jack, 5—on the premises. The boy Jack is the man who is the apparent suicide in the present day.

I really enjoyed McTiernan’s style of writing, and the way she leads the reader through the (admittedly convoluted) story lines. I did feel like there were a few problems with the scene-setting: Reilly is made out to be a big success in Dublin, and yet you see few signs of this when he’s on the ground in Galway. There is never sense made out of the hostility of some of his co-workers. There is virtually no development of Emma—she is an occasional presence, but I couldn’t tell you what she looks like, or anything much about either her job or her life with Cormac except that she works late a lot, leaving him on his own at the pub. But the rest of the characters, the ones directly involved with the mystery, are charismatic, and the sympathy with which she portrays the tragedies that result from the total inadequacy of the children’s social services in Ireland is compelling. I liked what McTiernan did with her material, and look forward to another outing with Cormac Reilly.