Book Review

By Derryll White

McTiernan, Dervla (2022).  The Murder Rule.

                  First Rule: Make them like you.

                  Second Rule: Make them need you.

                  Third Rule: Make them pay.

This is a family story – intriguing, twisted and compelling for that very reason. We all have family. Hannah Rokeby has a particularly hard time with a manipulating mother and a presumably dead, murderous father.  Hannah is an idealistic law student bent on vengeance.

McTiernan is a remarkable writer who understands how to build a character and nurture tension to the breaking point.  Hannah breaks out of her nice-girl, studious self to meet amazing challenges which appear, build, and seem not to resolve.

The author bounces back and forth in the story between 1994 and 2019 but does so in a very managed way which keeps the reader on track all the time.  Again, this time shift simply demonstrates the power of McTiernan’s writing while she keeps the suspense building, the conclusion masked. There is tension throughout with small beginning lies growing, gaining speed and power as the years are shed. As the cover says, “No one is innocent in this story.”

This is quite a different book from ‘The Scholar,’ which was a tour-de-force of its own. Dervla McTiernan is definitely a writer to catch up with and follow.  Readers will not be disappointed.

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Excerpts from the book:

REVELATION – There was so much mocking sarcasm in his voice; he barely held back from outright laughter, and something in me just snapped.  I walked the few steps across the little room to him and I slapped him, hard, across the face.  He let me do it.  Then he stood up and he punched me.  His fist connected with the side of my temple.  I fell sideways and I was unconscious before I hit the floor.  I don’t think I was out for very long.  When I came to I was lying on my side, and my arm was bent underneath me.  I had landed on it when I’d fallen.  Michael was sitting on the small couch looking down at me with this expectation on his face … like a benign kind of interest.

    I scooted backward away from him.  My head was throbbing, the entire left side of my face was on fire.

    I said, “You killed Tom.”

    “Yes.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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