Book Log 2020 #51: The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

Early in his career in the Garda, the Irish national police, Cormac Reilly answers a call at a decrepit house, where he discovers two children whose mother is dead upstairs. He calls in for assistance, and files the case away.

Twenty years later, Reilly has returned to Galway, where he has to re-establish himself with the local Garda bosses after years working in Dublin. When he's given an apparent suicide to investigate, it turns out the death has a connection to those children from that early case. And it looks like it was no suicide.

This is kind of a bumper time for crime fiction set in Ireland, between Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad and Adrian McKinty's series with Northern Irish detective Sean Duffy. I don't think this book is quite up there with either of those, but it's a solid first outing that will likely see me pick up the second one. Eventually.