Reviewer ANNA CREER continues her life of crime fiction with two cracking novels, one set in Ireland and the other in India.

Dervla McTiernan is an international, best-selling author. Her debut novel, The Ruin, (2018) set in Galway Ireland won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and introduced Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly, McTiernan’s clever, honest, decent policeman.

Two more novels in her Cormac Reilly series followed, The Scholar (2019) and The Good Turn (2020). Now Cormac Reilly returns, after an absence of five years, in The Unquiet Grave. 

McTiernan has said: “I didn’t have a new story for Cormac for a long time. I think I’d put him through so much by the end of The Good Turn that most of me felt like he needed a solid break”.

But having read an article about bog bodies, thousands of years old preserved in the peat bogs of Northern Europe, tortured and bound in strange, ritualistic ways, she realised she had found the perfect story for Cormac. 

When a body is found in a bog near Galway, the immediate response from the police is to suggest it’s a find for archeologists. 

“The skin was chestnut brown and wrinkled. Both arms were bent so that the elbows could nearly be seen… there was a dark wound on the back of each arm… and thin tree branches, stripped of twigs and leaves… protruded from each wound.” 

However, evidence on the body reveals it’s a modern murder. 

The dead body is identified as Thaddeus Grey, principal of the local secondary school who had disappeared two years earlier. The investigation reveals that he had been a bully, targeting some pupils relentlessly but there seems to be no explanation for the ritualistic nature of his murder. 

However, life becomes more complicated for Cormac when the Commissioner of the Garda Siochana, the most senior position in the Irish police force, pressures him to accept promotion to inspector and take over the complaints section of Internal Affairs. 

At the same time his ex-girlfriend Emma asks him for help. She’s pregnant, her husband has gone missing in Paris and the French police are refusing to investigate his disappearance.

The Unquiet Grave is an intriguing novel, complex, multi-layered, exploring the bullying behavior of a number of self-obsessed, sociopathic men. 

ALTHOUGH Vaseem Khan is British born, it was the decade he lived in India that has inspired his crime writing, as well as his current position in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London, which applies science to help prevent, reduce and detect crime. 

He is the author of two crime series set in India: the Baby Ganesh Agency series and the CWA Historical Dagger winning Malabar House novels set in 1950s Bombay. 

He says that it’s his “attempt to look at a period of Indian history that’s not often examined in fiction… a couple of years after Gandhi’s assassination and the horrors of partition”. 

In Midnight at Malabar House (2020) he introduced Inspector Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective who struggles to assert herself in a paternalistic, misogynistic society. Her appointment seven months earlier had “occasioned hysteria” in the press.

Although she topped her year at the academy, Persis has already been sidelined to a crime unit in Malabar House, “a menagerie of misfits… the unwanted and the undesirables” exiled and despised for blunders and mistakes.

Persis’ mistake is that she is female, smart, stubborn with a “prickly personality” and a refusal to conform, which means she’s seen as a troublemaker. 

City of Destruction is the fifth in the series and begins with Persis at a political rally where the new defence minister Rafi Azad is demanding India take up arms against its new neighbor, Pakistan. Persis foils an assassination attempt, but in the process, her friend and colleague Archie Blackfinch is critically injured. 

With the help of the British government’s India Office and two MI6 agents, detectives from Malabar House are assigned to discover whether the would-be assassin had accomplices. 

Persis, however, to her disgust, is sent to investigate a badly burned body on the rocks near Raj Bhavan, “another of those crazy self-arsonists. Suicide by protest”. But it’s another murder.

Persis determines in her stubborn way to investigate both cases, eventually travelling to New Delhi in search of answers. 

City of Destruction is not only clever crime writing but also a fascinating insight into a moment in history when Nehru’s India is “a giant awoken from slumber, blinking owlishly in the sunlight, conscious – and at the same time, oblivious – of the damage that might be done by a lurch into the unknown”.