Dervla McTiernan - The Scholar

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Rather run-of-the-mill

I find myself out of step with the majority of reviewers because I didn’t think The Scholar was all that good. I had expected something above the average for this very over-populated genre, but I’m afraid I didn’t really get it.

This is the second in Dervla McTiernan’s series; I hadn’t read the first, but it works fine as a stand-alone novel. Cormac Reilly is a Garda sergeant in Galway who investigates the death of a young woman near the university. The investigation soon becomes embroiled in dealing with a rich, powerful family and the political machinations which that involves...and it all seemed terribly familiar, somehow. I had worked out what was going on a very long time before the apparently brilliant Reilly did and the police’s sheer obtuseness was very frustrating, as were the clichés of the genre as they mounted up – the Personal Involvement of the investigating officer who, needless to say, is taken off the case...and so on, and so on.

I also found McTiernan’s writing style quite hard to get on with. There are far too many points of view in the narrative which meant that it lacked focus for me. I got very little sense of place, despite an interesting location in Galway. Dialogue was slightly stilted in that way that doesn’t quite ring true as real conversation and she will insist on telling us what she has already shown us; as a small example, having been told important new information, “Cormac nodded slowly, thinking it through.” I realised that he’s thinking it through, thanks – that’s why you’ve told us that he’s nodding slowly; I don’t need everything clumsily explained in case I haven’t got it. There’s a lot of unnecessary detail which bogs the story down, like when a character borrows a flatmate’s bike without permission; she finds his keys “where he had left them, as always on the kitchen counter. He cycled to college sometimes. That way he could have a drink or three in the afternoon and cycle home. He stored the bike in the basement of the apartment building, but he was obsessive about locking the thing up, so she would need his keys.” We really don’t need all that extraneous stuff to tell us that she takes his keys to unlock the bike in the basement. This happens a lot; I felt like I was being treated like a slightly slow-witted eight-year-old much of the time.

So, I rather trudged through The Scholar and found it a bit of a chore in the end. Plenty of others have enjoyed it very much, but personally I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to Sphere for an ARC via NetGalley.)