'DERVLA MCTIERNAN’s
THE MURDER RULE is a legal thriller based around the quest of a young law student (Hannah Rokeby) to prevent the man who ruined her mother’s life from getting out of prison. The novel’s shifts of plot and perspective raise questions of truth that are essential to the story, and they highlight the same kinds of questions about the stories with which we all prop up our own sense of truth and reality. The book is a departure from the Irish Australian writer’s previous work in both genre and setting: while the novels for which she is most known are a trilogy of police procedurals set mostly in the west of Ireland, her new novel is set in Maine and Virginia.'
(Introduction)
