The Ruin
Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation—sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a fun day-trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they find an ancient ruins site ... and the terrifying presence that lurks there.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Ruin
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Twenty years after a young Garda named Cormac Reilly found a dead heroin addict and her two cold children in a derelict County Mayo house, he is transferred to Galway. There he is handed the file again as a suspicious suicide pulls in the grown-up brother and sister from that night in 1993.
The most commonly searched is The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan (2018), the first book in her Cormac Reilly Irish detective series. The metadata above lists Scott Smith in error.
Dervla McTiernan has written four main Cormac Reilly novels: The Ruin, The Scholar, The Good Turn, and The Murder Rule. Connected novellas also expand the world.
The Ruin is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Ruin takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Ruin is a standalone novel by Scott Smith, not part of a series.
The Ruin is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.