From that point on, as they investigate and also try to earn badges for their activities, and tensions mount at home, things start to spiral desperately out of control for the Copseys.

Police corruption, an investigation that ends in tragedy and the mystery of a little girl's silence - three unconnected events that will prove to be linked by one small town. The characters are well defined, you could almost smell the inside of Wesley's house and the cacophony of noise, compared to Margot's house where it's just her and her dad. Josie is brilliant, sassy, confident, most of the time, and is big enough to apologise when she has to. I hope there are more adventures for The Copsey's. Cormac Reilly #3 is the best so far, in what has been a must-read series right from the start. Dervla McTiernan is a first class storyteller. What a fine author is Dervla McTiernan! In "The Good Turn", she splits the narratives early in the book, with Garda Cormac Reilly being suspended and remaining in Galway, and another young Garda, Peter Fisher, a protégé of Reilly, being sent to the seaside village of Roundstone as a banishment for a suspected unlawful killing.A missing child leads to Cormac Reilly and his protege Peter Fisher being on the outs. While Peter is shipped to Roundstone to work with his estranged father, Reilly digs deep into the corrupt police dept he is being forced out of.

In this story of hope and endurance, we follow a scientist and her team during their search for the elusive 'Giant Arctic Jellyfish'. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Sounds like a country copper, whereas Cormac Reilly has come from Dublin and wants to cross every T and dot every i. But Peter has seen enough of Reilly’s methods to question his father’s rather dismissive air and his demands that Peter stop questioning people about something which Des considers an open-and-shut case. Looking for more challenging tasks, Josie enlists her friends Wesley and Margot into her very own Scout troop, the Copseys, named after the street they all live on. Together they start their quest for their camping badge by sleeping out near to the abandoned factory behind their houses. And alongside this is Anna and her daughter Tilly, currently mute from some unnamed trauma. They begin as a separate thread and join the other threads as the story moves on. I did find The Ruin (book #1) to be a tad slow, as it takes nearly 100 pgs to really get to the case at hand, but #3 was off to the races from pg 1. My butt cheeks were CLENCHED for the first 20% as Cormac and his skeleton crew race to find the kidnapped girl. She was relentless with it. And even though it did slow down to more of a casual trot, there was still lots of meat to the story.

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The Good Turn is a twisty and well executed story following 3 main storylines . Cormac is struggling with his superiors who are still making life hard for him. On top of that his personal life is just going from bad to worse. Garda Peter Fisher is relocated out of Galway after he is put in an impossible position and faced with prosecution he moves to Roundstone, a small town and is set to work with his father, a man that he has never seen eye to eye with. We also hear about Anna and her daughter Tilly who escape Dublin when Tilly stops talking.

While writing alternative stories to a significant degree, McTiernan develops Reilly's head-butting with authority in Galway, despite more senior officers' warnings, and Fisher's dealing with his father who is his boss at the Garda station in Roundstone. Fisher Snr. has an 'old-school' approach to policing, with an "I'll help you and you'll owe me one later" approach. Both narratives have smaller, side-narratives, and McTiernan draws them all together in a most satisfying denouement. Enlisting her friends Margot Anderson and Wesley Evans, the trio begin their quest for their Camping Badge. Drawn to an abandoned factory nearby, they stumble across something strange. A square, ancient television and two tatty armchairs. Beside it, a wooden sideboard with an old photograph of a young, happy couple.Whereas books #1 and #2 both had one main, obvious crime, the fabulous thing about this story is that there are actually a number of different things going on at the same time. Some of the issues that popped up towards the end of The Ruin are now under Reilly's magnifying glass, along with the events occurring in a few other seemingly disparate threads. The way McTiernan weaves the story together is just brilliant. Of course not. Reilly has been working with a smaller and smaller team of garda (Irish police) in circumstances obviously designed to set him up to fail. He’s a nuisance, because he’s smart, thorough, asks questions, and follows through.