Dervla McTiernan is best known for her multi-award winning series of Irish procedurals featuring police officer Cormac Reilly. She comes to Australia (specifically Melbourne) in her latest stand-alone crime novel Three Reasons for Revenge, a cracking, twisted tale, and one that only gives up its secrets as it morphs from an investigation into a thriller.
The book opens with Detective Sergeant Judith Lee taking a statement from Alexis, a young woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted by her therapist. Lee has some history with this therapist and the story sounds familiar, but before she can investigate too far the therapists wife receives a mysterious package and his life starts to come apart. When Lee starts to follow up she finds that Alexis has disappeared and two other, seemingly unrelated, people are drawn into the case. Lee soon starts to suspect that something more is going on.
That is really as much that can be said about Three Reasons for Revenge without giving away some of the many twists and turns. And it is great that McTiernan has set this thriller in Australia, and in the city – Melbourne once again seems to be the place for Australian crime stories.
Lee, at the centre is a policewoman with a complex past and who is also navigating power and reputation issues within the police force. McTiernan gives readers enough clues to stay a little ahead of her but this just increases the tension. While the final act is fairly standard for narratives of this type, by then the tension is at its highest and readers are likely to be fully invested.
McTiernan has all the elements right for this type of thriller – great setting, engaging protagonist, scarily competent antagonist, a puzzling mystery and a slow ratchetting up of tension. All of which makes Three Reasons for Revenge hard to put down.
Three Reasons for Revenge by Dervla McTiernan
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