The Murder Rule in Aussie Readers

Oct 26, 2022 Bree T rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, thriller, library-reads

This was…..an interesting one.

I’ve had this on my must-read list since it was released. I really love Dervla McTiernan’s three Cormac Reilly crime procedural novels and this one is something completely different and stand alone and I thought it sounded incredibly interesting. I requested it through my local library because I wanted to see if I was going to love it as much as the Reilly books and…well, look, that ended up being a good decision.

The Murder Rule takes place in two timelines – in 201 This was…..an interesting one.

I’ve had this on my must-read list since it was released. I really love Dervla McTiernan’s three Cormac Reilly crime procedural novels and this one is something completely different and stand alone and I thought it sounded incredibly interesting. I requested it through my local library because I wanted to see if I was going to love it as much as the Reilly books and…well, look, that ended up being a good decision.

The Murder Rule takes place in two timelines – in 2019, we have law student Hannah, who emails the boss of the ‘Innocence Project’ group, run through the University of Virginia which handles miscarriages of justice. She tells him that she knows the places are all filled but she’s transferring there this semester and she think she’ll make an amazing addition to the team. Despite the professor emailing her back saying no, she manages to sort of blackmail? her way onto the team and she begins working with the organisation, sifting through the myriad of applications they get from prisoners asking them to look at their case.

Interspersed are the stories/diary entries from 1995 which are Hannah’s primary motivation for moving down to Virginia and volunteering as part of the Innocence Project. Whilst the Innocence Project are trying to free a man on death row, Hannah moves among them as a mole unbeknownst to them, because she’s there to make sure that man pays for his crimes and that he never sees the light of day.

It’s not that this is bad….it’s just that it requires an awful lot of looking the other way about things. And all fiction requires that to some degree but this one seems to require it more than a lot of others. This is an incredibly highly sought after volunteer position for those enrolled in law at University of Virginia, honestly the idea that Hannah could just randomly email the guy running it after the deadline and be like ‘well you need me!’ feels…..incredibly unlikely to pay off. There’s a sort of attempt at justification for her inclusion but for me, it wasn’t very strong. And that thread continues throughout the book right until the payoff at the end, which for me, was like Dervla McTiernan watched Legally Blonde one night and went…. “ok, but make it gritty”.

I think the problem for me is that most of this is so benign and nothing much is happening that you’re always looking for the twist, you’re waiting for it to come, because if it doesn’t then why else does this book exist. And when it does come (and there are a couple, one of which I’ll admit that I didn’t see coming), because I was always looking for the thing that was going to happen, knowing something was going to happen, that there was going to be some big dramatic reveal that would flip everything upside down, I think it lessened the impact when it did happen.

Also, Hannah. I’m not sure she carried this well enough for me. I am not sure if it was a deliberate tactic but we’re told almost nothing about her. She’s third year law in Maine or somewhere (this is the source of some amusement to the professor who is in charge of the Innocence Project, I assume Maine is low down the list for post-grad law schools) but we know almost nothing else about her except that she’s motivated to keep this one particular criminal in prison, for personal reasons. Because we know so little, sometimes it makes it difficult to grasp her being able to do the things that she does in the book, there’s nothing remarkable about her as such, she really does’t seem like she’s an outstanding student and she does prove she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, including basically ruin the lives of innocent bystanders and then she keeps managing to put together things that other people do not. I get she has information (kind of?) that others do not but ironically she’s the only person who seems to firmly believe that the prisoner is guilty and should never be released.

This was readable and I did enjoy it but I didn’t love it. And I think that unfortunately, it’s the sort of book that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, the more you think about it the more you realise it crosses the line of unbelievability and it also seems to happen so quickly. They find these people that no one has been able to find for a decade and there are so few genuine obstacles in their path. A bunch of college kids beating lawyers and cops at their own game. And I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, just that the way in which it happens felt a little too easy for me.
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