Bestselling Perth author Dervla McTiernan strikes again with new release, The Unquiet Grave

West Australian

29-04-2025

Irish-Australian author Dervla McTiernan is returning to her roots — not by moving back to Ireland, but by penning a return to her wildly popular Det-Sgt Cormac Reilly series, with pacey new thriller The Unquiet Grave out on Wednesday.
The literary homecoming for the bestselling crime writer — who is based in Perth with her husband and two children — is a highly anticipated occasion for loyal readers who have been begging for a return to Cormac's gritty world.
Set in the misty, windswept landscapes of Ireland, DS Reilly investigates a murder in the boglands of Galway.
Irish bog bodies provide an extraordinary window into ancient Irish society and are among the best-preserved human remains that can date back to the Iron Age.
McTiernan's modern take on this culturally rich slice of Irish history is a centrepiece of the book.
'I came across an article about bog bodies. It wasn't the first time I'd encountered this bit of Irish history,' McTiernan tells The West Australian of what first sparked the novel's concept.
'And the idea struck me — what would happen if a body was found with the exact same pattern of injuries in a very similar place? But its contemporary . . . a modern body. Someone has done this today.'
As the novel unfolds, McTiernan delves into the effects of grief and the burden of unspoken pasts.
As for the motivation behind creating her literary leading man the way she did, she says: 'For me, writing Cormac was initially a reaction to some of the crime fiction I was reading.
'I was getting a bit frustrated (to) come across yet another detective who's bemoaning the fact that his marriage is broken down, (or) that he'd lost his wife, or his wife had left him, but also that his 20-something-year-old daughter he had no relationship with . . . All I found myself doing was rolling my eyes.'
Why? Because the men she knew 'weren't like that'.
Consequnetly, McTiernan's stereotype-defying depiction of Det-Sgt Reilly quickly won the hearts of thousands of readers across the globe in previous books The Ruin (2018), The Scholar (2019) and The Good Turn (2020).
'I wanted to write a central character that I could really admire. I don't think it's that impressive if you solve the crime but you never pick your kids up from school,' she says.
In the beginning of the Cork-born author's writing career, her sister gave her a firm word of advice.
'She said: 'You need to be careful that you don't start writing about the Ireland you knew, and not the Ireland of today',' she says.
'She was right then, and she's still right today.'
To combat this, McTiernan visits her homeland often, noting the country is a 'politically and socially aware' destination that changes quickly.
Her legal background, too, continues to shape her writing.
Before turning her hand to writing, McTiernan spent 12 years as a commercial lawyer working on contracts with 300-400 pages, plus an appendix — all of which she would have to memorise.
This process proved invaluable in her eventual shift to creating complex plot structures.
'You have to hold the map of the contract in your head and it trains your memory in a particular way. My books have quite complicated plots, and they have to weave back into each other in a way that feels seamless and natural to the reader,' she says.
McTiernan has cemented herself as one of Australia's premier crime writers with six successful novels, two of which are in development for screen adaptation — The Murder Rule and What Happened To Nina?
Which begs the question, if The Unquiet Grave were to be adapted for the screen, who would play her beloved Cormac?
'There's so many amazing Irish actors out there. I always think of Jamie Dornan in The Fall. He was so spectacular in that show and I know he was very dark, obviously, playing a serial killer, whereas Cormac is quite the opposite. But I could see (Dornan) playing the role in the sense of delivering Cormac in a nuanced way,' she says.
The Unquiet Grave by Dervla McTiernan, $34.99, is published by Harper Collins on April 30.