In What Happened to Nina? (Morrow, Mar. 2024), Dervla McTiernan’s second standalone thriller, a young woman’s disappearance, and the presumed guilt of her boyfriend, Simon, throws two families into terror, and gives rise to a thousand internet comment threads hashtagged with the novel’s title. McTiernan, who grew up in Ireland and lives in Australia, spoke with PW about crime and clickbait.
What are the ethical implications of making entertainment out of crime?
There are no real people in this made-up story, but I can’t take the moral high ground. At one point in the book, a girl posts a video of herself talking about Nina’s disappearance while doing her makeup. She doesn’t see herself as doing anything wrong, but there’s a real disconnect there. When something awful happens to someone else, we see them as other. As soon as someone is the target of a high profile investigation, people talk about it like it’s entertainment. They don’t consider that there’s a family on the other end of it. It’s natural to be interested in what makes people behave the way they do, particularly criminals, when someone has broken all the social norms. What’s unnatural is the feeding of the interest on social media, when people edit footage or suggest conspiracy theories.
Simon’s mother fears that her son’s case will be “tried by internet”—is this a new phenomenon?
The interest in true crime has always been there. In the 1670s, court employees published chapbooks and broadsides about the dying words of criminals, and details of their crimes. Now we have the widespread manipulation of social media. Online, everything is a commodity, particularly attention, and certain cases just capture the public imagination. Jamie is afraid that Simon will be tried in the court of public opinion—that even if he’s innocent, this accusation will follow him for the rest of his life.
How did you develop the two mother-child relationships in your book?
They had to feel real, not just the subject of the tragedy. Particularly with Leanne, Nina’s mother. She feels she did so much wrong. What was wrong with their relationship? Why didn’t Nina come to her? That was the part of Leanne that was the hook. It felt real. Jamie, Simon’s mother, was different; it was harder to find sympathy for her. She wasn’t a perfect mother, but she thought she was doing okay, and she loved her son. She saw him with rose-tinted glasses all the way to the end.
Your Cormac Reilly series is set in Ireland, and your two standalones have been set in the U.S.—why the location shift?
The silly answer is that I have a friend who only sets her books in Paris and New York so she can visit for research; this setting let me travel. The more complex answer is that I lived in the States when I was in law school, in New Jersey and Maine, and those memories are very strong. Something about America just captures the imagination. Growing up in Ireland, we got American TV, and it seemed so big and exciting and dangerous and bright. As a writer, it’s a country that really draws you in; there are so many stories to tell.
