Crime readers rejoice! After a five-year hiatus, Dervla McTiernan’s much-loved Irish detective Cormac Reilly is back. In The Unquiet Grave, Cormac – still dealing with the personal and professional fallout from the events that took place in 2020’s The Good Turn – is called to investigate the case of a body in a bog that has turned out to be considerably less historical than anticipated. The victim, an assistant school principal who went missing several years earlier, was seemingly killed and surrendered to the bog in the same manner as the 2,000-year-old Croghan Man. But who could possibly have hated him enough to subject him to such ritualised violence?

Meanwhile, Cormac’s ex, Emma, has called on him to help her find her missing husband, and an unscrupulous software programmer has concocted a scheme to cheat the National Lottery. That McTiernan can weave these three completely different threads together into a seamless whole is evidence of her remarkable skill as a storyteller. The Unquiet Grave is a finely-wrought police procedural that relies more on impeccable characterisation and evocative landscapes than blood and gore. The result is a compelling, fast-paced and thoughtful crime read from one of the genre’s masters.