DERVLA MCTIERNAN The Scholar. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
This second novel in the DS Cormac O’Reilly series cements Irish-born, Australian-resident Dervla McTiernan as one of the up and coming stars of crime fiction in both countries.
DS Cormac O’Reilly of the Garda was introduced to readers in the highly acclaimed debut The Ruin. Both it and The Scholar are police procedurals, although it’s the personal aspects of all the characters’ lives that stand out. Without watering down the classic police-procedural elements of who, what and why, it is outcomes that McTiernan is most focused on — not just for the police, but also for victims, families, witnesses, and communities.
For those who haven’t read The Ruin, Cormac O’Reilly was introduced in a story that wove his past (starting out as a fresh-faced rookie cop 20 years ago) into the present, when he was tasked with re-investigating a case from all those years ago. The question of outcomes was at the forefront: the ramifications of both what he might have missed as a new cop, and what happens when that past comes back at you. O’Reilly’s life, his backstory and personal relationships, are woven into both these books in snippets. Some of it is hinted at, all of it integrated into the storyline in a way that will ensure that readers could easily start out with this second novel if they preferred (although going back to the start would be highly recommended, if for no other reason than that The Ruin is a brilliant debut).
The Scholar finds O’Reilly, now in his second year stationed at Galway, stuck investigating cold cases, because there’s something about his reputation that makes everybody in the Garda mistrust him. Not that his colleague Carrie O’Halloran has the time or energy to care about the politics. She’s overworked, exhausted and her family life is suffering:
Cormac was surprised, but not unpleasantly so, to receive a text message from Carrie O’Halloran asking if he was free for a quick drink. He was in town anyway, as it happened, having a pint and waiting for Emma.
Dr Emma Sweeney is O’Reilly’s partner, a research scientist at Darcy Therapeutics laboratory:
But Emma being at the lab so late was nothing new. She’d always worked long hours, always been dedicated to her job, and their move to Galway the year before had done nothing to change that. They’d moved for Emma’s job. She’d been head-hunted by John Darcy himself. He was familiar with her work – she was a research scientist, a designer specialising in cutting-edge biotechnology – and he’d argued that only Darcy Therapeutics could offer her the environment she needed to make the kind of breakthrough she was capable of. Other pharma companies were either too small to carry the cost, or so big that corporate processes would slow her down.
Emma had wanted it badly, had been ecstatic when Cormac said he would support her, move with her, but he’d always wondered how much of her enthusiasm was rooted in a wish to get away from Dublin, to get away from everything that had happened there. Cormac had played down to Emma the degree to which he’d been sidelined in Mill Street over the past year. He hadn’t wanted her to worry, hadn’t wanted to disturb the stability they’d managed to establish in Galway.
O’Reilly might have started out being sidelined, but his problems get even murkier once O’Halloran starts manoeuvring for some of her cases to be handed over to him (hence the drink). Including the investigation of a body Emma has found lying on the road between the university precinct and the laboratories of Darcy Therapeutics.
The body is that of a young blonde woman. She’s been hit by a car, and run over again for good measure. The damage inflicted is brutal, and O’Reilly is instantly worried about the impact this discovery will have on Emma, for reasons the reader will not discover until later in the novel:
Cormac wanted to reach out to Emma again, but with the barest shake of her head she asked him not to. She was just holding it together, maybe, and anything more from him might send her over the edge.
Much of the plot of The Scholar is delivered in slow, careful, drip form. There is also much about the plot that will be easily deduced. The position of the girl’s body means she is either a student or someone connected with the laboratory, and that’s a political problem for O’Reilly straight out of the box. Emma has some immediate clues about the woman’s likely identity, based on her hair and clothes, and the prologue to the novel has already telegraphed a part of the tangled web to the reader.
The fact that you can make a pretty good case for the who and even the why does not detract from the important bit of The Scholar, which once again is outcomes. Carline, a poor little rich girl, granddaughter of John Darcy, has had a difficult life, not helped by money or family connections. Her brains, and her ability in the same field as her grandfather, might have been her way back to connect with her family, but the mistakes of others, the death of her father, her mother’s behaviour, even the circumstances of her conception, have conspired to make her life nowhere near as ideal as you’d expect for somebody born into wealth and privilege.
Then there’s Emma Sweeney, who has also had a difficult life, her childhood marred by tragedy. As an adult she has forged a career and a partnership with Cormac O’Reilly — a partnership that’s threatened by this case, and O’Reilly’s own actions.
O’Reilly’s bullheadedness has a lot to do with the fallout here, and there are times when this empathetic, clever and strong main character is so frustratingly real you may find yourself glaring at the pages on which he stumbles about, behaving like an absolute twerp. He should know it’s an investigation he should never be heading up, he should know that his behaviour will cause tension and possibly extra trauma, and he should know that those of his colleagues who are out to get him will take any opportunity to do so, no matter how slim and no matter how personally undermining for themselves.
The Scholar is all about lives, and cases and people, who aren’t as straightforward as everybody thinks. It includes red flags that seem clear-cut, and lots of little things that slip under the radar. They are what create the waves, tensions and consequences for everybody right up to and into (with luck) the next book in this excellent series.
Dervla McTiernan The Scholar HarperCollins 2019 PB 384pp $32.99
Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.
You can buy The Scholar from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
