For those looking for a brilliantly crafted thriller, “Three Reasons for Revenge,” by Dervla McTiernan will suit perfectly. The main character is deliciously imperfect as are all the other characters. Detective Sergeant Judith Lee is a single, forty-year-old woman with only one good friend. She’s not close with her mother, who married an abuser. When the abuser also beat Judith at the age of fifteen and then tried to kill her mother, Judith took a golf club and killed him.

Now Judith is in the homicide division, but when a young woman named Alexis Turner shows up at the station, she requests to speak with Judith. What she tells the detective shocks her because word-for-word, she repeats what another young woman had told Judith ten years earlier about a respected psychologist who was sexually inappropriate. Ten years before, Judith had not reacted the way she should have to the woman. So now Judith takes the information and tells Alexis she’ll start an investigation. But Alexis asks if that will be fruitful since it will be a he-said she-said situation. Judith can’t give her a satisfactory answer because it’s very hard to prosecute these types of cases.

Robert Walker, the therapist who we assume is a terrible person, is married to Vanessa Walker, a popular and extremely successful television personality. Vanessa receives a beautifully wrapped package, carefully addressed in lovely calligraphy, with a note inside. Also inside is a thumb drive, and on the thumb drive is a video of her husband having sex in his office with someone not his wife.

Shortly thereafter, he is killed. In his home with a weapon that is missing. Judith receives an anonymous phone call telling her about the death, so she’s first on the scene. And she does something there that she shouldn’t. Something that she will regret later. The murder seems to be quickly solved when an anonymous call (yet another anonymous call) is made directing the police to the apartment that Jack and his son Cameron live in. There they find Jack with a gun in his backpack, ready to leave. The fact that he received the gun in a beautifully wrapped package with a cryptic note doesn’t matter. He has the murder weapon. And upon further investigation, he had a reason (kind of) to kill the therapist.

Other packages, all beautifully wrapped, addressed in gorgeous calligraphy, and with a cryptic note enclosed, also in that lovely calligraphy, along with an item specifically selected for the recipient, arrive at the homes of various characters. Judith finds that she is not only investigating the murder of the therapist, which she doesn’t believe Jack committed, but she ends up more involved in the criminal acts leading up to the crime than she ever might have dreamed.

What McTiernan does that is especially chilling is that she creates a protagonist and an antagonist who share many of the same qualities and same type of abusive history. Like the killer, Judith has many flaws and makes some really poor decisions. And while the identity of the killer isn’t a huge surprise by the end of the novel, that discovery doesn’t diminish the suspense at all. Police failures, a brilliant killer who has had years to plot it all out, and a main character whom we are rooting for, all serve to make this a book that is hard to put down. McTiernan also raises an uncomfortable question: how bad does someone have to be before we feel his or her death is justified? When the truly awful therapist is killed, some might think: well that’s justice. But as she finds out, non-judicial justice is a slippery slope. A truly thrilling read with characters and a plot that make this a joy to read.

This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.