Bestselling thriller is the ultimate escape
Dervla McTiernan's 2024 standalone What Happened to Nina? is a murder mystery/thriller so unconventional and compelling I could not put it down until I emerged, blinking, two days later.
McTiernan is an internationally bestselling Perth-based author. This is not part of her blockbuster crime series starring Detective Cormac Reilly, the first instalment of which Colin Farrell’s production company is adapting for TV, but a standalone.
A New York Times best thriller of the year, What Happened to Nina? follows Nina and Simon, a young couple in love – at least, until they go on holiday to Simon's family’s country house, and only Simon comes home. His explanation about their last hours together doesn’t add up. Nina’s parents push for answers, and Simon’s parents rush to protect him. They hire expensive lawyers and a PR firm that quickly ramps up a vicious, nothing-is-off-limits media campaign. Outgunned by Simon’s wealthy, powerful family, Nina’s parents recognize that if playing by the rules won’t work, it’s time to break them.
Standalone crime thrillers can sometimes feel dissatisfying to me. Lacking a central detective character built and honed over multiple novels, and by necessity having a focus on a fast pace and intricate plots, this can sometimes equal minimal character development, which not even the craftiest plot can make up for. To put it simply, if this reader doesn't care about the who, they won't care about the what, the why or the how.
But McTiernan sensitively and compellingly portrays the four parents at the centre of her drama. Like a painter evoking a great deal with few brushstrokes, every word has been made to count in the sketched backstories, glimpsed thought processes and overwhelming parental instincts of Lee and Andy, Jamie and Rory. The passages in which these parents reflect on their kids, from remembering them as children to seeing them as teenagers, are among the book's most powerful. It is devilish hard to effectively put words to the full gamut of parental feeling, from tender to fierce, but McTiernan nails it.
She also employs numerous shifting perspectives, with multiple points of view included in addition to the parents’ and switch back and forth between chapters and even some switching from first to third person. This, too, might in less skilled hands further erode the chance for character depth, but here only adds to the richness of the picture.
The reason I called this book unconventional is that it reveals relatively early to the reader ‘what happened to Nina’; the rest of the book is about when, and how, the rest of the characters will find out – and how they will react. There is certainly no loss of momentum, with the action never letting up and the surprises continuing until the final page.
Again with a minimal touch, McTiernan has realised her rural Vermont setting so beautifully you would have no idea she's an Irish-born writer based in Western Australia.
She handles with equal subtlety its hyper-modern theme: how misinformation spread online can swiftly 'flood the zone' and disrupt society’s working, with devastating consequences. McTiernan's scenario lays bare the darkest implications of such a trend for our civilisation.
I read this over two days in which I was sick and unable to leave the couch for any length of time, and despite its sometimes grisly scenes and frequently foreboding themes, it also managed to act as a comfort read, allowing me the ultimate escape – into the pages of a novel.
Steer clear of this if you like cosy whodunits with minimal blood. But if you like a bit of grit and enjoyed Gone Girl, any of Val McDermid's books or McTiernan's previous works, you can't go wrong here. McTiernan is going from strength to strength.
Want to get notified of my next post? Subscribe.