The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan

 

Detective Cormac Reilly gets a call one night he should never have gotten.  His girlfriend, Emma, has come upon the body of a girl in a car park as she left the lab where she worked.  Cormac goes to the scene and is assigned the case although normally he would never be given the case due to his relationship to the witness.  There is no identification on the woman except for a lab access card.  That card belongs to Carline Darcy who also works at the lab.  In fact, Darcy is the granddaughter of the lab's founder and owner.

But it turns out that the woman is not Carline Darcy.   It is instead a woman who attended Galway University with Carline named Della.  According to Carline, she barely knew Della but Cormac believes there is more of a relationship than she is admitting to.  Della had a once in a generation brain and shockingly, for a poor girl from a poor family, an apartment full of cash.  As the investigation progresses, the case is taken from Cormac and given to another detective.  Against orders, he keeps up with what is going on and Emma's involvement gets deeper and deeper to the point where she moves from a witness to a suspect.  Will the relationship survive?

This is the second book in the Cormac Reilly series.  Cormac gave up his career as a lead detective in another city to follow his love, Emma, to Galway when she is offered the position at Darcy Laboratories that can make her career.  This police procedural is different as it explores not just the case but the relationship between Cormac and Emma, and whether a love can survive suspicion.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.