A slow burn to a solid finish. I did find this hard to get into, partly because I didn't like any of the characters.
Hannah doesn't let anything get in the way of what she wants. By the end of the book I still didn't really like her but could understand her motives.
The diary entries initially made me feel sorry for Laura, despite her not being a nice person as an alcoholic mother. I liked her less as we saw how manipulative she was.
Even without any legal knowledge, some of the legal aspects of the book were a little over the top and hard to believe.
This is the first book I have read from this author. I would like to try another as other reviewers suggest this is quite different to her usual books.

Questions in the reader's mind start in the first chapter – why is Hannah creeping out of home in the early hours of the morning?

Hannah is a university student studying law. The story starts with her sneaking out of the house she shares with her alcoholic mother for unclear reasons. She transfers to another university and, by deceitful means, manages to get herself onto the Innocence Program run by Professor Rob Parekh and supported by a team of students. The program is dedicated to revisiting cases involving convicted prisoners.

Hannah particularly wants to be on the team of a specific case, that of Michael Danridge. Michael has been in prison for 11 years for the rape and murder of a young mother. He swears he is innocent and was only found guilty on flimsy evidence. Hannah uses devious ways to secure her place. Unlike the rest of the team, she intends to work to keep Michael in gaol. Her reason gradually comes to light through her mother’s diaries from 1994, in alternating chapters of the book.

Time is short for both the team to prove his innocence and for Hannah to succeed in her goal.

But doubt starts to enter Hannah’s thinking. It began when she went to the prison with Sean to interview Michael. Her investigations bring to light a crooked cop and cover ups. She begins to realise everything is not as it seems or as it has been portrayed but who is lying and who is telling the truth?

The characters are well developed. Hannah is not particularly likeable but interesting. She is smart, and conniving and will do whatever she needs to achieve her aim. The other two students are great characters although we see more of Sean who is very likeable.

I have purposely not said too much about the story, so I don’t spoil the mystery and suspense.

The story is slow at the beginning but still interesting. Stick with it. The gradual build-up with its many twists and turns makes for a gripping story filled with tension, corruption, and secrets.

As the mystery unravels, we read of intrigue, violence, and deception all making for a suspenseful and exciting read.

Warning: story contains sexual assault and violence but does not dominate the story.

Thank you to Netgalley, Harper Collins Australia, and the author McTiernan for an ARC in return for an honest review. Due publication date May 2022

I first discovered Dervla McTiernan with the Cormac Reilly books which I was absolutely captivated by. So imagine my excitement when The Murder Rule was released - a new stand alone book!!

I was absolutely enthralled from the beginning! So many twists and turns I could not put this one down.

Thanks for the opportunity to read and review this beauty of a book!

Dervla McTiernan leapt to prominence in the Australian crime writing scene with her multi-award winning debut The Rúin, set in McTiernan’s native Ireland. That book, and the two that followed, centred around detective Cormac Reilly. In The Murder Rule, McTiernan tries something different. This is an American legal thriller and courtroom drama that uses as its focus the very real Innocence Project, a group dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions.
When The Murder Rule opens, protagonist Hannah is blackmailing her way onto the Innocence Project run out of the University of Virginia. And while the reasons are not quite as she believes, Hannah manages to get a place with the Project, a group comprised mainly of volunteer university students. But what she really wants is to get onto the much smaller team helping run a high profile appeal against the conviction of Michael Dandridge. And it soon becomes clear that this is so she can sabotage the work and ensure Dandridge stays in prison. And she will pretty much do anything to get her way. Hannah’s connection with Dandridge and this particular case is unclear but slowly becomes explained in carefully doled out entries from her mother’s diary.
Most people reading legal thrillers know that the criminal law system does not run in quite the way it is described on the page. But McTiernan takes such huge liberties with the system and how it should work that even not knowing the actual detail it is hard to suspend disbelief. All of which builds up to the completely fantastical final act courtroom scene. And all of the plot driven by a series of twists that, again, readers of this genre are likely to see coming from a long way off.
Plenty of Australian crime authors are moving into territory well populated already by American crime writers. The danger is that there is already a huge body of great courtroom thrillers from some of the biggest names in the publishing – Turow, Grisham, Connelly – so it’s a tough genre to break into. So while The Murder Rule may scratch an itch for lovers of this type of narrative, it does not reach those heights. But The Innocence Project does important work and as the centre of a crime series is potentially a great engine for interesting stories. So while this book does not use it as effectively as it could there is scope for some interesting sequels.

Although different to Dervla McTiernan’s earlier series, The Murder Rule does not disappoint. Set in America, the story follows Hannah as she begins to volunteer at The Innocence Project. The split narrative takes the reader through the story of Hannah and her mother cleverly take the reader through the dual timeline that has led to her present circumstances. A good thriller read for fans of this genre.

This was a unique story set in America. I liked the narratives based on Hannah's perspective but didn't like the diary entries as much. Whilst I understood their inclusion and the reason for the irritating voice, it was explained too late and so I was just annoyed by them!
Some elements were predictable, but there were certainly other moments that were not. Some good character development present as well.

I went in blind with this book, I just seen it was by Dervla McTiernan and knew I had to read it and it most definitely did not disappoint.

Hannah Rokeby manages to wrangle her way into The Innocence Program at the University of Virginia, a group of law students who work with death row prisoners who are believed to be innocent. Her intent is to get onto the case of Michael Dandridge and stop him from getting free before it's too late.

I loved the way the story was written, with diary entries from Hannah's mum when she was a teenager included along the way. Laura knew Michael back then and her diary entries paint him as a monster. In the present day he is on death row for the brutal rape and murder of a single mum but the people of the Innocence Program are sure he was set up.

Small town secrets, revenge, betrayal, untrustworthy characters... Dervla McTiernan delivers one compelling story with The Murder Rule and I found it hard to put it down. It is full of suspense and twists to keep you guessing and the ending was nothing like I thought it was going to be when I first started.

Thanks to NetGalley/Harper Collins AU for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. Definitely recommend checking this book out May 4th if you are a thriller fan.

I have read and enjoyed another book by Dervla McTiernan so I was keen to read the Murder Rule; it certainly lived up to my expectations. The story begins with Hannah Rokeby, a law student from Maine emailing Robert Parekh to get a position as a volunteer on the Innocence Project that he manages at the University of Virginia. The Project involves Parekh and his team of carefully selected law students defending innocent death row prisoners who have been imprisoned due to a miscarriage of justice. Hannah has read about Parekh and his work in a Vanity Fair magazine article. It is difficult to get on the team and Hannah is prepared to use devious tactics to be accepted. The team is working to free a man called Michael Dandridge who had been imprisoned for the murder of a women eleven years earlier. Hannah lives with her needy, alcoholic Mother, Laura and has to leave home secretly while her Mother sleeps to move to Virginia so that she can work on the Project. The story is told alternating between Laura’s diary which she had written twenty five years earlier and Hannah’s present day story.
The Murder Rule is hard to put down as the connection between Laura’s diary and the Michael Dandridge case is uncovered. The story contains deception, corruption and violence with great plot twists. I highly recommend this book.

What is this about?
Hannah is determined to avenge her mother’s rape by macking sure that Michael Dandridge remains in prison for the murder of a woman years ago. She’s going to do it from the inside, by joining the Innocence Project working on his case and bring it crumbling down. But nothing is ever that easy, and instead she finds secrets and lies, upon secrets and lies.

What else is this about?
This is a twisty mystery that rips Hannah and Dandrige’s case apart and puts it all back together into something different.

Blurb
For fans of the compulsive psychological suspense of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a mother daughter story—one running from a horrible truth, and the other fighting to reveal it—that twists and turns in shocking ways, from the internationally bestselling author of The Scholar and The Ruin.

First Rule: Make them like you.

Second Rule: Make them need you.

Third Rule: Make them pay.

They think I’m a young, idealistic law student, that I’m passionate about reforming a corrupt and brutal system.

They think I’m working hard to impress them.

They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row.

They’re wrong. I’m going to bury him.
Dervla Mctiernan’s The Murder Rule is nothing like her Cormac Reilly series. I have to admit, it took me a few chapters to get into this book, but then Mctiernan hits her stride.

This is a book about unwrapping secrets and lies upon more secrets and lies, and while I wasn’t immediately a fan of the pacing, I did begin to understand better as I got deeper into the book.

Hannah is a law student and determined to do her bit in The Innocence Project by all appearances. Instead, she’s there to make sure that Michael Dandridge remains in prison for the murder of Sarah Fitzhugh and pays for raping Hannah’s mother, Laura.

Getting on the project and Dandridge’s case isn’t easy, and Mctiernan dives into the lengths Hannah will go to do so, and who she will ruin to make sure she does. It’s illuminating, and given more depth because Hannah’s chapters as she worms her way onto the case and into the team’s work are interspersed with her mother’s diary entries from years before, detailing her experiences with Tom, the man she fell in love with and Hannah’s father and Michael, the man who raped her. Laura has never recovered from the experiences years ago, and there’s a sense of escape around Hannah when she leaves home to join the project, leaving her mother and her issues behind. It gives insight into their relationship that I didn’t expect for Hannah is devoting herself to her mother’s cause, but their relationship isn’t what you’d expect.

Once she is on the Innocence Project’s team, Hannah begins to work on the case with the other, delving into things that might prove Dandridge’s innocence. She is contemptous of the team, of their devotion to his innonce to the exclusion of anything that might show he may be guilty.

The team itself is mostly made of young, idealistic interns and law students who do genuinely believe in what they are doing. They are the ones that Hannah accompanies, while the team leaders (the lawyers) in this book are somewhat remote for me.

Secrets and lies are par for the course in books of this nature, and I desperately want to go further, but to do so would be to ruin what turned out to be a wonderfully complex mystery with characterisation that was entertaining and which kept me hooked to the end essentially.

Given how I felt about the beginning I was surprised when I ended the book and in my head, I was going: ‘Already??’ McTiernan’s writing is efficient, and I felt like in this one she stripped characters bare, moved to the heart of them and their issues and what that meant to the case quickly. Perhaps because this is a standalone? I don’t know, either way I loved it!

I’ve read several of McTiernan’s books and enjoyed them all but I think this one is the best so far. The basic story is that Hannah reads her alcoholic mother’s diary from when she was a young woman which tells of a love affair and abuse. Hannah is a law student and the man who abused her mother is currently in jail for another crime. Hannah reads that The Innocence Project, a group of law students who work on cases where they believe someone has been wrongly convicted, is trying to free the man who abused her mother. So Hannah manages to join them and convince them to let her work on the case with the intention of making sure he stays convicted.
This story is as much about character as it is about plot and so was a pleasure to read. The intrigue will keep you reading well into the early hours so be warned!

Law student Hannah Rokeby travels to Virginia to study for a semester at UVA where she has managed to get herself a position with The Innocence Project. The team are working to retry the case of a convicted murderer whom we discover Hannah‘s family has a connection to.

This is the fourth novel by Dervla and a break away from her previous three novel series.

This mystery was full of twists and kept me on the edge of my seat I very much recommend it.

The Murder Rule is the fourth novel by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Dervla McTiernan. Law student Hannah Rokeby leaves her mother Laura in Orono, Maine and travels to Charlottesville, Virginia to study for a semester at UVA. She has a convincing cover story and manages to get herself a trial position with The Innocence Project. Professor Robert Parekh takes her on despite her fairly blatant attempt to blackmail him into it, but she will have to prove her dedication to the cause.

Parekh’s intimate team of three students is faced with an urgent case preparation: their latest client, Michael Dandridge, having served eleven years for the rape and murder of Sarah Fitzhugh in Yorktown is, due to certain technicalities, about to face trial once again. Within days, Hannah has manipulated the situation to her advantage, becoming one of Rob’s team.

What isn’t apparent to anyone on the team is that Hannah is not there to help prove Michael ’s innocence; rather, she wants to see him incarcerated for as long as possible, and to this end, sets about surreptitiously sabotaging their efforts; she knows something about Michael Dandridge that they don’t.

Laura Rokeby’s journal from 1994, the year she worked as a maid in a Seal Harbor Hotel, describes her summer love affair with a rich young man, an affair that ends with a shocking tragedy.

McTiernan’s first stand-alone novel has a plot that twists and turns and keeps the reader guessing right up to those jaw-dropping reveals. The felony murder laws and the inner workings of the Innocence Project add interest, and very little suspension of disbelief is required with this intriguing page-turner.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Harper Collins

This thriller/mystery novel revolves around a dodgy murder conviction that is up for review and a young law student who becomes involved in a project to prove the accused’s innocence. Hannah is ready to take time away from her difficult relationship with her alcoholic mother Laura and manages to gain a place on “ The Innocent Project” where a well meaning team are working desperately to repeal the case against Michael Dandridge, a convicted murderer who has spent eleven years in prison. Problem is, after finding and reading her mother’s diary as a teen, Hannah has another agenda…. undermine her new colleagues and confirm his guilt.
The diary entries from 1994 are interspersed with Hannah’s shenanigans on the case. And as we readers start to question Hannah’s preconceived biases, she also starts to have doubts…..not only about the case, but about her past and who she even is.
Unfortunately I found both Laura and Hannah very unlikeable and highly unethical. The story though does draw you in. As the facts unravel, uncovering the truth brings danger and fractures relationships. Can Hannah pick up the pieces and redeem herself?
Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The blurb for this book drew me in as it didn't give away too much but made me feel I needed to know more. It started slowly (but not too slowly) building the story and the suspense. It kept me reading with the twists and turns, the tension and the characters which really helped make the story real.

I love the aspect the diary brings and the way you get to know Laura and I love how Hannah gets involved in the project and works her magic. This is a book that keeps you on your toes and on the edge of your seat as you never can quite see what is coming.

A great book and I highly recommend it.

The Murder Rule by Dervla McTiernan is a standalone - a departure from the Irish-born Australia-dwelling's Cormac Reilly series that I've enjoyed over the past four-ish years. I've read many good things about [The Murder Rule] over recent months and I can only agree as McTiernan manages to offer readers a likeable (though agenda-laden) lead, intriguing plot and several twists and turns to keep us guessing.

Hannah's very likeable though we're introduced to her as she's blackmailing her way onto the University of Virginia's Innocence Project program. She's also moving to Charlottesville without telling her mother and most definitely has an agenda. Because she doesn't just want to volunteer for the Innocence Project, but she wants to work on a specific case. And she has to do some nefarious things to get there. 

So it'd be easy to find her conniving and untrustworthy. Though interestingly she isn't. We learn some of her backstory pretty quickly, including her complicated relationship with her mother Laura. The latter we're told has never recovered from some events that took place when she was a similar age to Hannah. 

Most of what Hannah knows about this time in her mother's life comes from a diary she discovered when younger. And McTiernan takes us back to 1994 via diary entries and we're introduced to an earnest young Laura trying to save for college by working as a hotel cleaner. 

We learn Hannah's seemingly dedicated herself to avenging what happened to her mother, and the impact it's had on her own life. 

Between the present and past we're introduced to drug dealers, corrupt cops and blackmailers. It doesn't take long before we discover the link between her mother's past and the case she's managed to wangle herself onto. 

Hannah and her Innocence Project colleagues revisit evidence from two decades earlier while their supervisors are preparing new legal arguments. McTiernan was a lawyer herself so seems comfortable with the courtroom scenes and legal proceedings. 

McTiernan offers up quite a few twists as the novel progresses so manages to sustain the climax for some time. I did wonder if some of the final courtroom scenes (and some of Hannah's prior actions) were realistic but assume McTiernan knows more about their legitimacy or feasibility. Perhaps it's more the ethics of some of the actions that will be worthy of bookclub discussion: the ends justifying means... or something.

I very much enjoyed this novel by McTiernan. She seems comfortable in this slightly crime-adjacent genre and I'd love to see more standalones mixed in with her usual series. (A la Michael Robotham, for example.)

Dervla McTiernan delivers another brilliant story with her latest novel, The Murder Rule. Hannah Rokeby is a young idealistic law student desperate to join The Innocence Project, an organisation who represents people wrongly convicted of a crime. The start of the novel moves between Hannah’s voice and the recollections of her mother in a diary kept during the summer of 1994, where she is the victim of a crime, and it soon becomes clear that the past and present are intertwined and Hannah’s motivations are not what they seem.

As McTiernan continues to weave the threads between past and present the tension builds as secrets and corruption are exposed and Hannah soon realises that she is in over her head and she might be on the wrong side of the battle, if a right side even exists.

To say more would be to spoil the thrill of the journey and by the end of the novel I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough, a sign of being in the deft hands of a master story-teller who delivers a deeply satisfying ending.

4.5 stars

3.5★

Dervla McTiernan has enjoyed enormous success with her Cormac Reilly series, and deservedly so. For her latest release, The Murder Rule (a standalone) she is trying something quite different. For me it was good, but didn't reach the heights of her Irish crime series.

Laura Rokeby is a fragile single mother with a strong, independent daughter in law student, Hannah. The two have a very close bond that members of larger or more traditional families might struggle to understand. Hannah has been looking after, and looking out for, her mother since she was 6 years old. Laura would be lost without her. So when Hannah literally sneaks off to Virginia without telling her mother her plans, you just know she has a compelling reason. She's gone to volunteer on the Innocence Project, a legal service within the University of Virginia Law School, that champions death row inmates who they believe to have been wrongly convicted. But she's not there to help - she's there to make sure the man who broke her mother stays in jail.

It was a good story with a couple of truly unexpected twists that make you question where you thought it was heading. If this had been McTiernan's debut, I would have been rather impressed. But it wasn't, and I think in a few weeks I'll have forgotten a lot of the detail of this story. Well, except for one thing. The diary entries. I won't forget Laura's diary entries because I thought they were the weakest part of the novel. After days of reflection I'm still undecided whether McTiernan's use of this device was clumsy or clever. These diary entries are threaded through the first 2/3 of the book, and each time I found them frustrating to read and a good excuse to put the book down for a while. Who writes a diary in the present tense? Or in such complete sentences, with that much background detail? By the time my brain circled back around to the idea that maybe it was actually clever, it was too late - I was already annoyed and disappointed. In the end, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and concede that she knew what she was doing.

That was anther winner from Dervla McTiernan. Law student Hannah Rokeby blags her way into a student associate position with the Innocence Project. Then she deviously manipulates things so that she is on the team working on the appeal for convicted murderer Michael Dandridge. The claim is that he had his confession beaten out of him and certain evidence that may have resulted in reasonable doubt was not presented to the court.

Hannah, however, is on a personal mission. For years she has looked after her fragile, alcoholic mother, Laura. As a teenager she found and secretly read her mother’s diary. In it, Laura describes one summer of her life. She was working as a cleaner at a hotel but some of the cleaners had side hustles and she was invited along to clean one of the big mansions that the wealthy use for summer holidays. Two young men were staying there - Tom and Michael. Michael didn’t seem to like her very much but Tom was friendly and they soon started seeing each other, Laura having ditched the cleaning.

She says the young men seemed to argue a lot. When the time came for them to leave, Tom decided to stay on another week with Laura and apparently Michael was furious. The next day Tom’s body is found near the jetty. It is deemed to be an accident - he was drunk, fell and hit his head and then drowned. Laura, however, is convinced that Michael killed him in a rage.

Years later Michael Dandridge is convicted of the murder of Sarah Fitzhugh. Angry on her mother’s behalf, Hannah sets out to scupper any chance of having him released.

The Innocence Project team go over all the evidence and speak to many witnesses in order to find something to exonerate Dandridge (of course Hannah is looking for the opposite). But what they find, what they slowly piece together is a surprise to everybody!

This one has a real kick in the tail! It was a wonderful plot with believable and likeable characters, mostly. By the end of the story though nothing was as it seemed and everybody was questioning their assumptions. There was a brilliant twist at the end and it’s likely not what you were expecting. I enjoyed this story from the talented Ms McTiernan immensely. Many thanks to Netgalley and HarperCollins Publishers Australia for the much appreciated arc which I reviewed voluntarily and honestly.

Author of the Cormac Reilly series, Dervla McTiernan has released a new standalone thriller - The Murder Rule. Promoted as a mother-daughter suspense story, it’s a legal thriller set in the actual existing University of Virginia Law School. Hannah is a law student who volunteers for the Innocence Project Clinic after transferring from Maine to be near her mother undergoing a clinical trial for cancer sufferers. Working on overturning wrongful convictions, the Project Team is working to stop the Dandridge case at its Preliminary Hearing. As the team explores all avenues, there is a glitch in the filings and other complications requiring additional follow up. Hannah’s involvement is no coincidence and the role her mother plays is revealed through her diary entries that Hannah reads. The tension mounts and the ulterior motives of those involved are brought into question, culminating in the finale with a decisive court hearing. The flowing narrative, subtle edgy drama and nuance law question of guilt or innocence, makes this a first-class legal thriller with a five-star rating. With thanks to Harper Collins Publishers Australia and the author, for an uncorrected advanced copy for review purposes. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own and freely given without obligation.

Admittedly I am a dedicated McTiernan fan. She just does it so well, seemingly effortlessly, although I suspect the opposite is true. Sure, I missed Cormack Reilly, and the geographical setting was puzzling, given that Dervla
is Irish and lives in Australia, but what the hell it fits the plot and the title.

It's been said that factually, within the legal framework, the plot is shaky. But then why 'Ruin' a good story with facts. It's about entertainment for me and a little poetic license never got in the way of a good trip to fantasy land.

I would like to see Cormack back sometime soon though. When you're on a good thing........