The Ruin

In 1993, a young Garda named Cormac Reilly is sent to a crumbling house in rural Galway, where he finds a dead woman and her two frightened children, Maude and Jack Blake. The case is taken out of his hands almost immediately, and he moves on.

Twenty years later Reilly has transferred back to Galway, sidelined into cold cases by colleagues who do not want him there. Jack Blake is dead, apparently by suicide, and his pregnant girlfriend Aisling refuses to accept it. Maude, missing for decades, returns from Australia asking her own questions.

Dervla McTiernan's debut is a procedural about institutions that protect themselves — the Garda, the Church, the families that closed ranks — and about how long an unfinished case can wait. It introduces Cormac Reilly and is set against a wet, unromantic Galway.