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.


In the new Faithful Place, the spotlight shines on Cassie's boss Frank Mackey, forced to return to the Dublin neighborhood he fled twenty-two years ago when his girlfriend Rosie Daly stood him up on the night they were to elope to England. Now her body, apparently murdered that night, has been found in the abandoned house where they trysted, and Frank must go home to Faithful Place and the toxic family he left behind. Like a silver ball trapped in a chilling arcade game, Frank caroms around The Place, bouncing between the haunting memories of his first love, the pain of his recent divorce, and the secrets and suspicions of the residents of Faithful Place, especially his own unforgettably vitriolic family--whose sad secrets, cruel dialogue, and tragic bonds reminded me of the poisoned families that haunt Pat Conroy's books.

Again French reels us into the ever-tightening noose around Frank as he faces impossible choices, sometimes with grace and sometimes with violence. When all the secrets are out no one is left undamaged, yet the resolution is grimly satisfying. And the final scene, when Frank relives the night he and Rosie realized they were in love, is so sweet and evocative that your sigh as you close the book is only part sadness.

And you wonder how you can wait a year or two for French's next book, and which of the minor characters will be its hero. I'll place my bet on the young cop Frank turns into a spy for him. See what you think.