As she uses her superior psychological acumen to spar with the chief detective – he attacks, she parries, he traps, she dodges – Ruby muses on the story of her life. And what an entertaining story it is. The murders are almost incidental, sandwiched between accounts of her extreme study habits at Yale, her complicated relationship with her brilliant platonic boyfriend Roman, her job, her spirited love life and her battered mother-in-law, Gertrude. “You better not try to get into my brain, little miss,” Gertrude snaps at her. (Oh, but she is.)
This is the first novel by Rothchild, a screenwriter and producer whose previous projects include “GLOW” and “The Bold Type.” She deftly jumps between past and present, introducing multiple cliffhangers that she leaves dangling for a long time before treating us to their resolutions. You may come for the mystery, but you stay for the pure energy of Ruby’s electrical presence.
Just a few pages in Dervla McTiernan’s excellent THE MURDER RULE (Morrow, 292 pp., $27.99), it’s already clear that the main character, Hannah Rokeby, is adept at the art of trickery. But while they don’t trust her completely, her colleagues at the Innocence Project, a group that helps exonerate the wrongfully convicted, admire Hannah’s sharp mind and focus on the prize. Exactly what the price is will take some time to emerge.
An exceptionally good mystery writer, McTiernan has moved this book from her native Dublin to the American South, where a man named Michael Dandridge makes time for the rape and murder of a young mother. Hannah makes her way to the legal team, where she continues…in fact, it’s unclear what she’s doing, or why.
The explanation lies in part in the chapters we read from Hannah’s mother’s well-thumbed diary, which tell of the transformative summer that led to Hannah’s conception. Marked by her experiences, her mother, Laura, has become a needy, manipulative alcoholic. One of Hannah’s duties will be to compare Laura’s account of the past with what the team is learning about the Dandridge case. “Questions she had brushed aside over the years now demanded her attention,” McTiernan writes.