Faithful Place

by Tana French

Ebook, 2010

Library's rating

Library's review

Tana French has crafted a most unusual series: Each succeeding book focuses on a character who was at most a peripheral player in the previous one. Here, in the third entry in the Dublin Murder Squad series, we are paired with Frank Mackey, who was the boss of Cassie Maddox, the heroine of Book 2,

The Likeness, who was herself a secondary character in the first book, In the Woods. It shouldn't work to keep shifting focus with each book, but it does.

Faithful Place is the street where Frank Mackey grew up, in an aggressively working class Dublin family. He planned to elope with a neighbor girl, but their plans went awry when Rosie never showed up at the rendezvous. All these years later, he's still wounded by her apparent abandonment. When it begins to become clear that Rosie may not have dumped him willingly after all, Frank is reluctantly drawn back in to contact with the dysfunctional family he left behind on that long-ago night. As he investigates what happened to Rosie, he has to come to terms with the idea that the answer lies within the Mackey clan.

I love how French never succumbs to genre stereotypes as she crafts these mysteries, and how vividly alive her characters seem. Each seems distinct and yet familiar at the same time, as if these are people we have met or at least heard about from a friend. I was kept guessing and caring deeply about Frank and the rest of the cast right to the end.

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Description

Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place. The hotly anticipated third novel of the Dublin murder squad.

Media reviews

Amazon

The past haunts in Tana French novels. That which was buried is brought to light and wreaks hell--on no one moreso than Frank Mackey, beloved undercover guru and burly hero first mentioned in French's second book about the Undercover Squad, The Likeness. Faithful Place is Frank's old neighborhood,

the town he fled twenty-two years ago, abandoning an abusive alcoholic father, harpy mother, and two brothers and sisters who never made it out. They say going home is never easy, but for Frank, investigating the cold case of the just-discovered body of his teenage girlfriend, it is a tangled, dangerous journey, fraught with mean motivations, black secrets, and tenuous alliances. Because he is too close to the case, and because the Place (including his family) harbors a deep-rooted distrust of cops, Frank must undergo his investigation furtively, using all the skills picked up from years of undercover work to trace the killer and the events of the night that changed his life. Faithful Place is Tana French's best book yet (readers familiar with In the Woods and The Likeness will recognize this as an incredible feat), a compelling and cutting mystery with the hardscrabble, savage Mackey clan at its heart.

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