Fiction

The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan

by Kirsten Tranter •

April 2020, no. 420

HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 400 pp

Fiction

The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan

by Kirsten Tranter •

April 2020, no. 420

Dervla McTiernan’s third novel consolidates her standing as a star of Irish detective fiction, following her breakout début, The Rúin (2018), and its follow-up, The Scholar (2019), all featuring Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly.

Dublin dominates the imagination of Irish crime writing, but McTiernan’s stories centre around the western city of Galway and the small towns that surround it, places with pretty, smiling exteriors that mask darker moral and economic realities. For every cheerful local pub and beautiful seaside terrace there is a building lot abandoned in the wake of economic crisis and a cheaply constructed block of units with no heating and a rent-gouging landlord.

Kirsten Tranter

Kirsten Tranter grew up in Sydney and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of three novels, including Hold (2016), longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her first novel, The Legacy, was praised by The Guardian as ‘a seductive contemporary literary thriller… a knowing, classy debut’ and was a Kirkus Review début novel of the year; it was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the ABIA literary fiction award, and longlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Kirsten completed a PhD in English Literature at Rutgers University in 2008, and publishes essays, journalism, and literary criticism. She is a founder of the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing.