{"id":5324,"date":"2026-06-04T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T01:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5324"},"modified":"2026-06-04T13:40:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T13:40:15","slug":"among-the-ruins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5324","title":{"rendered":"Among the Ruins"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ireland in 1970 is teetering on the edge of being a good place for women, but it\u2019s not moving quickly enough for Nicoletta Sarto, who\u2019s on maternity leave from her journalism job at Dublin\u2019s Sentinel. As the book opens, she\u2019s due back at work in a week, but stuck between two forces: her boss wants her back early, and everyone else, from her useless partner, Barney, to her coworkers and family, thinks she should stay home with her new twin girls. Nicoletta does whatever she wants (hooray!), and she\u2019s soon back at work, patching together daycare from various reluctant family members while pursuing a crime story. (Never mind that she\u2019s supposedly working on the newspaper\u2019s \u201cwomens\u2019 pages.\u201d) The story of murder and stolen art, interspersed with looks at women\u2019s rights (not many), class differences (too many), and organized crime (ditto), takes an unexpected turn and is followed by a surprising and lovely coda showing Nicoletta post-chaos. <strong>A fast-moving and interesting look at the recent past, with a gritty character to cheer on&#8211;get this on your TBR.<\/strong> In the meantime, try the first in the series, <em>Where They Lie<\/em>, which features Nicoletta in the \u201860s.\u2014<em>Henrietta Thornton<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ireland in 1970 is teetering on the edge of being a good place for women, but it\u2019s not moving quickly enough for Nicoletta Sarto, who\u2019s on maternity leave from her&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5323,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[90,51,53],"class_list":["post-5324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-political","tag-thrillers","tag-women"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Ruins-1-400x400.png","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Ruins-1-400x600.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}