Every novel by Tana French is a gem, but for me, Faithful Place has an edge over the rest. In her Dublin Murder Squad series of six books (so far), French specializes in crimes where one of the detectives has a distant connection to the crime, either because of the location or because of the people involved. There are layers of memories overlaying the detective’s observations that play into the investigation as well.
In Faithful Place, there are more than memories. The dead body of a teenage girl is found in a building under construction in the small street. She was killed about 20 years ago and the suitcase found with her identifies her as Rosie Daley, who was thought to have run off around that time.
Frank Mackey is not on the murder squad, but is a law unto himself and will not be ignored. His family still lives on Faithful Place, and 20 years ago Frank and Rosie had been planning to run away together. But Rosie didn’t arrive at their rendezvous, and Frank, bitter and angry, walked away and joined the Dublin police department.
But now it seems as though Rosie had indeed been planning to run away with Frank. Who would have stopped her so violently, and why?
The book is written in Frank’s voice, and every paragraph exudes his personality.
I live on the quays, in a massive apartment block. [..] The carpets are so deep that I’ve never heard a footstep, but even at four in the morning you can feel the hum of five hundred minds buzzing on every side of you: people dreaming, hoping, worrying, planning, thinking. I grew up in a tenement house, so you would think I’d be good with the factory-farm lifestyle, but this is different. I don’t know these people.
In this novel, family is not just part of the background history: they are front and center. And what a family, the Mackeys! The father, with his hacking cigarette cough and bad back, still with suppressed vicious anger, both physical and mental, “looked stone cold sober, although with him you could never tell till it was too late.”
Frank’s mother, arthritic and unhappy, but forever supportive of the father, “five-foot nothing of curler-haired, barrel-shaped, don’t-mess-with-this, fueled by an endless supply of disapproval.”
Carmel, the oldest sibling warm and familial, blind to anything she does not like to see, “four kids and an arse like the 77A bus”.
Frank’s older brother Shay , is “like standing next to a power line: it makes you edgy all over.”
Frank’s little sister Jackie, the only one who is in touch with Frank, who passes on ” every detail of everyone’s life.”
And the youngest, Kevin, “selling flatscreen TVs and had a new girlfriend every month.”
As you see, every sentence captures the personalities from Frank’s perspective, and their conversations and behaviour thereafter show even more than Frank’s brief summaries. But this is not just a novel about a dysfunctional family, it is a thriller, and each scene is perfectly framed to raise the tension and move the plot forward.
And the dialogue is lovely. I don’t have an ear for the subtleties of class in Ireland, but by all accounts it is spot on.
“Give us a lift?” Jackie asked. “I came straight from work, and today was Gav’s turn for the car.”
Carmel tucked in her chin and clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Will he not pick you up?”
“Not at all. The car’s home by now, and he’s in the pub with the lads.”
“I’ll drop you home, so. Tell that Gavin, if he’s going to let you work, he could at least buy you a car of your own to get you there. What are yous lot laughing at?”
“Women’s lib is alive and well,” I said.
“I never had any use for that carry-on. I like a good sturdy bra.”
Machiavellian Frank Mackey, always a step or two ahead of everyone else, is not assigned to the case himself, of course, but operates outside the police machinery. There are excellent scenes where he’s ruthlessly playing the two assigned detectives for information, where I simply marvelled at his mental chess.
“See what your super thinks”, I said. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he would talk to his super, but if I backed off too easily he would start wondering what Plan B I had up my sleeve.
The last third of the book is riveting as it comes to a spine-tingling close.
French’s first novel, In the Woods, was wonderfully atmospheric as well, but the incomplete denouement left me mildly frustrated. The Likeness, her second, was excellently done, but the central premise was hard to believe. This, her third, is perfect as a novel, a thriller, and a mystery. As with her other novels, there are no completely happy endings; the narrator is always tortured by the part they played and what might have been different.
The Dublin Murder Squad series is not a traditional detective series with a recurring detective. French picks one detective from the previous novel as the narrator for the next. And she is the rare writer who writes both male and female protagonists very well. Try The Trespasser, my other favourite, for a wonderfully complex, smart, and tough female detective, Antoinette Conway.
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