Dervla breaks new ground with gripping crime novel

“I do the hard work so you can sit back and enjoy the journey,” says Galway author Dervla Tiernan with a laugh. She’s referring to her latest book, The Murder Rule, which has just been published by the Harper Collins publishing empire and is a page-turner.

Dervla who lives in Australia with her husband, Kenny, and children, Freya and Oisín, was back in Galway recently to launch the book as part of a whirlwind tour of Ireland and England. And while she had to return to the Southern hemisphere immediately afterwards, she’s due back in Galway soon to visit her parents, Enda and Marguerite, and her siblings, all of whom use the Irish version of her name, Dearbhla.

She’s not a bit precious as she explains it was easier to anglicise it to Dervla, given her status as a best-selling author in Australia, which is now home and where people have difficulty with the Irish version, Dearbhla. She had already sold 400,000 books there before The Murder Rule was published and it’s looking good too.

Unlike Dervla’s three earlier books – a trilogy based in Galway and with detective Cormac Reilly as their main character – The Murder Rule is set in the USA. Its central character is Hannah Rokeby, a bright, young law student who’s on a mission to avenge a family wrong. In order to do so, she applies to volunteer for the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law. This programme works to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes in that state. Despite her apparent idealism, Hannah is not interested in reforming a system that’s corrupt and brutal, or in freeing a man on death row who is believed to be innocent. Her aim is to see him buried.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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