The Murder Rule

Irish-born McTiernan (“Cormac Reilly” series), who now lives in Australia, sets this stand-alone suspense novel in the United States. Hannah is a law student at the University of Maine. Leaving her ill mother, she heads to the University of Virginia for a semester and volunteers for the Innocence Project, pulling strings and manipulating situations until she gets a place on the team seeking to free Michael Dandridge, who was convicted of murder. But Hannah’s motivations for getting close to the Dandridge case are very different from what she claims. Hannah’s story alternates with diary entries written by her mother, Laura, when Laura was a young woman working at a resort on Maine’s Mount Desert Island and cleaning houses for extra money. There Laura met a wealthy young man named Tom and they fell in love, before he died in an apparent accident. Hannah works steadily to derail the Project’s work on Dandridge’s behalf, but the longer she spends on the case, the more cause she has to wonder if she’s on the right side. Kate Orsini, Sophie Amoss, and Michael Crouch capably narrate this twisty story that will please listeners who enjoy Ruth Ware and Tana French.