Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan

Dervla McTiernan is an Irish lawyer who emigrated to Australia about 10 years ago where she took to crime fiction writing. Her first book about Cormac Reilly, The Ruin, was published in 2018 and became a top seller in Australia and Ireland and an Amazon book of the year in the US. The Scholar (Penguin, 2019) continues the story of Cormac Reilly, a sergeant in the Mill Street Garda Station of the Dublin police. He ticked the Superintendent off awhile back and has been assigned to cold cases since then, allowing his excellent skills to rust and the least experienced of the sergeants to carry the bulk of the investigative load.

Carrie O’Halloran, the most junior sergeant, appeals to the Superintendent to offload some of her work to Reilly. While they are discussing the logistics of moving the cases, Reilly receives a telephone call from his live-in girlfriend, Emma Sweeney, who has found a body in the street, clearly the victim of a hit and run. Both O’Halloran and Reilly rush to the scene, the university campus where Sweeney works.

The student identification card found in the victim’s pocket says she was the granddaughter of the owner of the huge global pharma company in whose on-site laboratory Sweeney works. Anticipating the media fireworks that were sure to follow, Reilly loses no time in alerting the Superintendent, who makes some calls to the family while Reilly goes to the granddaughter’s apartment to find someone who might be able to identify the badly damaged body. The Superintendent regretted his haste when Reilly finds the granddaughter quite alive and well in her apartment.

Discovering just who the victim is consumed everyone’s time over the next several days. The granddaughter denied knowing the victim and or how her ID card came to be in the victim’s pocket. The absence of any other identification or personal possessions on the victim led the police to think the death was deliberate rather than accidental.

The mistaken identification is a nice twist in the book that occurs almost immediately and creates an opportunity to delve into the police procedures for determining identity. The relationships among the police at the station and their procedures made this story a good read. The puzzle part was surprisingly thin. I realized what the motive was about halfway through and, since only a couple of people could have that motive, it wasn’t hard to see who the killer was. I am not one who tries to figure out the killer in advance, I like to let the author tell me, so for me to like this book as much as I did is a little surprising. But like it I did. Recommended for readers of police procedurals and character-driven mysteries.

·         Paperback: 384 pages

·         Publisher: Penguin Books (May 14, 2019)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0143133691

·         ISBN-13: 978-0143133698

Aubrey Hamilton ©2020

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.