The good turn by Dervla McTiernan

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HarperCollins, 2020. ISBN: 9781460756799.
(Age: Senior secondary - Adult) Highly recommended. If charmed by enigmatic Detective Cormac Reilly in McTiernan's previous two novels, The Ruin and The Scholar then you will be enthralled by his investigation style once again in The Good Turn. Here he is still out of favour at his station at Galway, fighting to remain sane after being stripped of his team, called away to help in a drug bust. But when an invalided boy sees a girl kidnapped outside his bedroom window, Reilly must summon who he can to help. His boss is deaf to his pleas, and when Garda Peter Fisher follows a strong lead alone, it ends with the suspect being killed. Fisher is sent out of the way to a small staton run by his estranged father, while Reilly is relieved of his post. Reilly flies to Brussels to see Emma, and she suggests that he resign and they stay in Europe, but Reilly has contacted his old friend who works for Interpol and together they see that there are stronger forces at work behind Reilly's shafting.
So he returns to Galway bent on uncovering the web of deceit and corruption which appears to lie at the heart of the station.
Meanwhile Fisher is contending with his hated father, an self opinionated old style cop who cuts corners. While investigating a pair of murders near the town, Fisher realises that things were not investigated with any purpose, things were overlooked, assumptions made. Fisher's grandmother is elderly and frail, looked after by an itinerant young woman and her daughter, blow ins from Dublin.
And so we have a set of gripping, overlapping stories, each one engrossing and at times heart stopping as Fisher and Reilly investigate things they are not supposed to, disobeying orders from above, putting their own careers and lives on the line. Ireland, Crime fiction, Corruption, Murder.
Fran Knight

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