Tana French's Irish Whodunits

Don't let Tana French's name mislead you--this talented writer, her conflicted characters who keep calling you back to the books, and her Dublin-area settings are all as Irish as St. Paddy. And if you choose the audio versions, you get Irish brogues to make the experience complete. But French's murder mysteries would be enthralling in any culture. Each story features a police detective and a memorable cast that includes someone who will turn out to be the hero of her next novel. (I love it when a minor character from one book hangs around in a writer's mind until he or she gets to play the starring role in another story.) French's books have it all--addictive plots, cinematic settings, and complicated, nuanced characters grappling with personal and moral dilemmas. Nothing's ever simple in French's books, and that's why they're so good.

In her first book, In the Woods, a gruesome child murder calls a young police detective back to the neighborhood where he suffered a childhood trauma that may enlighten the current case--if it doesn't cause him to crack first. His partner in the case is Cassie Maddox, who gets the lead role in The Likeness, where she must take on the identity of a murder victim who looked just like her. Cassie moves in with the victim's grad school housemates, a close, committed group of cultural rebels, and before long she's wishing she really were part of this strange little family, threatening both the case and her own sense of identity.

The idea that a person can pass as someone else while living with people who knew the missing person intimately requires a hefty suspension of disbelief, but French's writing is so good that I shrugged away my skepticism. The characters are so alive, so present, that I was drawn in as Cassie herself was. I felt like a presence in the room, the silent one in the back biting her nails while she listened wide-eyed and waited for Cassie to be discovered, or followed her down a moonlit country lane to the site of the murder, willing her to give it up and get back to safety.