The Murder Rule - Dervla McTiernan

 

This suspense novel follows law student Hannah as she transfers universities with the goal of joining the Innocence Project - a project dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions and freeing innocent people from prison.  On the outside, she is a typical, idealistic law student who wants to see justice win out.  But her true intentions for joining the project are more sinister.  The project's main case - a man convicted of the rape and murder of a young mother - hits a personal spot for Hannah and while the rest of the team is fighting to free this man, Hannah is fighting to keep him locked up for good.

TW/CW: police brutality/corruption, alcoholism, rape

 The main story takes place over the course of about a week so we don't have a lot of time to dilly-dally.  I really enjoyed the characters in this and was surprised by the amount of character development McTiernan was able to squeeze in.  All of the development felt really natural and there wasn't any time that felt info-dumpy to me.  As this is a legal suspense, we do get some poetic waxing on the state of the United States justice system and these conversations are a pretty good window into these characters and their mindsets. I really liked the side characters and how much information we were able to get about them in a very short amount of time.  I think McTiernan does a great job of having just the right amount of small talk scenes to get some background information to the reader but not too many that it distracts from the main plot.  I do wish we had seen more of Hannah's background and how she grew up.  We get little snippets here and there but I never had enough time to really sit with those situations before the plot kept moving on to the next point.  Hannah's childhood and her relationship with her mom are so integral to the plot but we get so little of those interactions actually on the page that I didn't feel like they had the emotional weight they should have. 

The twists and reveals come late in this book, but when they hit it is perfection.  This book utilizes my favorite trope in a fantastic way (but that trope would be a spoiler).  There were a couple of reveals that felt like they were a little bit of a cheat because they were not at all telegraphed to the reader ahead of time and they should have been.  We were close enough to the characters involved in the reveal that we should have gotten some sort of feeling that something wasn't quite right.  Instead, the reader is lead to believe that X is true for quite a while only to have the rug pulled out from under us.  It was the type of reveal where, when thinking back, the reader was specifically not shown the situations that would have given the reveal away early.  I didn't want to be able to guess the reveal, I just wanted more of a feeling that there was something else going on that the reader didn't know about so that when the reveal did happen, I still could have a feeling of 'ah-ha, I knew there was something going on!'

The tension in the second half was fantastic and there were some truly pulse-racing moments.  The first half is a bit slow paced and low tension as the characters are starting to gather witness statements and double check paperwork.  I think the tension in the first half could have really been upped if we saw some more of Hannah's scheming and some of the more hands-on ways that she was planning to sabotage the case.  It feels, at times, like Hannah is just there hoping that they'll find evidence that the man is guilty but then we do see her take some definitive actions at other times. Seeing her take more of these steps on page could have really upped the tension as we would have more easily seen Hannah as infiltrating the project.  In any case, once we get past the midpoint reveal, everything ramps up.  The stark difference in mood between the two halves might be a little too much for some readers to find believable, but I found McTiernan toed the line just right for my personal tastes.  The second half is where the story transitions from a more clerical-heavy legal suspense to straight up small town thriller and I absolutely loved it.  I also loved how these tension-upping reveals we get are mentioned in passing a few times earlier in the story so instead of these changes coming out of nowhere, it feels like a puzzle piece finally falling into place. 

The main plot takes place in 2019 but we also get some chapters from Hannah's mom's journal from when she was growing up.  It isn't initially clear how, exactly, these journal entries are connected to the main plot, but by the halfway point, it is very clear.  I thought the journal was used really well to give us a quick drop of exposition and then get us back to the main story.  If this was told in flashbacks instead, I think it would have dragged the pacing down a bit.  It was interesting to see the differences between Hannah's mom we see current day and this version in the journal.  I also enjoyed the difference in voice between Hannah's chapters and the journal although the journal chapters did feel more juvenile than I would have expected.  I wish we would have seen some more journal entries - maybe Hannah's from when she was growing up? - as a way to flesh out some of the missing background that I wanted.  

Overall, this was a really great legal suspense/thriller.  I think these characters were all perfectly cast and I was genuinely shocked at some of the reveals we got.  I do wish we had gone further with some of the character backstories and started building the tension a little earlier, but all in all this was a solid read. 

Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for the ARC

Expected publication date is May 10, 2022