The Unquiet Grave, Dervla McTiernan

The fourth book in the Cormac Reilly series from Irish / Australian author Dervla McTiernan, has a series of strange deaths in bogs near Galway as the central focus, with a sideline in Reilly trying to find an Irishman missing in Paris, and some potential career changes for him and his closest team member as secondary threads.

New readers to this series might find that THE UNQUIET GRAVE will work fine for them, the backstory to all the main characters is filled in nicely, but if it's possible to have read the series in order, then you're going to have a much better grip on the ups and downs of the professional and personal of this group of cops, their friends and families. 

The central story though is around the discovery, initially, of a man's body who had been ritualistically tortured and laid out in recent years. It turns out that very near to where the body was found, a local school principal had disappeared a couple of years earlier. Thaddeus Grey was a bit of a recluse, seemingly a quiet man who worked his job, and went home to a grey little cottage on the edge of the bog, nothing particularly special about him, until Reilly's team start digging a bit, and a more detailed, and worrying picture starts to appear of an arrogant man who bullied some of his students.

The picture then gets a bit more murky as more bodies show up - similarly laid out in the bog, but the ritualistic aspects are slightly off - like somebody had read the story of what happened to Grey but hadn't quite grasped the full details. This serves to excite the higher-ups, and confuse the picture ever so slightly as Reilly works out if they are looking at a connection or an opportunity.

Meanwhile his ex-girlfriend is married to another man, pregnant and worried sick as her husband has vanished in France. French police are fairly laid back about the whole thing - assuming possibility that the upcoming happy event isn't, but Emma is sure her husband would not simply dump her like that. And there's a potential career change on the horizon for Reilly and his sidekick, neither of whom are quite convinced about the opportunity before them.

A lot going on then that sort of works, although the Emma thread was possibly the one that sort of stuck out a bit as to why, but then again, they have history and in the earlier books in the series, their split was a major event for Reilly to deal with. As is the potential of the new job, and the loss of his valued friend and sidekick, and the bosses behaving oddly, and all these bog bodies, and the rain. Lordy it rains a lot in Galway. Or maybe that's just the view of an Australian reader who seems to spend most of their life battling drought and stinking heat.

It's a good series this one, readable, interesting, relatable and engaging. The main investigation thread relies always on hard work, intuitive thinking and a motivated and cooperative team of people. The murder reasons are always believable, and the suspect's and the clues there for readers to find and follow.