"Tana French first played with a 20-year-old crime in her impressive 2007 debut. In the Woods told the story of detective Rob Ryan, whose two best friends disappeared aged 12 while playing in the woods, their bodies never found. Two decades on, a child is murdered in the same place and Ryan must confront his past.
She does it again with her third novel, Faithful Place, and it's even creepier. Dublin cop Frank Mackey (he played a bit part in her second novel, The Likeness) is 19, waiting for his girlfriend, Rosie, and for their midnight escape to London from the Liberties, the poor area of Dublin where they've grown up. But Rosie never shows and Frank assumes she's changed her mind and gone without him.
Desperate to escape from his alcoholic, abusive father and manipulative mother, he leaves anyway. Twenty years later, he gets a phone call from his youngest sister Jackie, the only one of his four siblings he still speaks to. Rosie's suitcase has been found, and their tickets to London – that she'd never have left behind – are still in it. Suddenly, everything Frank has told himself over the years is thrown into doubt.
Darkness, tragedy and danger creep and crawl through this novel, not on a grand scale but on a chillingly believable, everyday one. Frank stands in his parents' living room during a wake and realises the murderer is present, someone in the room, and it starts to feel "underlit and threatening, shadows piled up too thick in the corners", as the booze continues to flow and the mourners keep on singing. He kisses his daughter goodnight and danger is "flickering like heat lightning around the stuffed toys, filling up that cozy little bedroom like poison gas". He finally asks the right question of the right person and gets the wrong answer, and "the room went soundless, a huge perfect silence like snowfall, as if there had never been a noise in all the world".
It's not the crime, or even the solving of it, that makes this one of the best thrillers so far this year – there's no serial killer stalking Dublin's streets, no big "reveal". It's French's skills as a storyteller that make Faithful Place stand out, along with her best creation yet, the enjoyably flawed Frank. Here's hoping he – and his chaotic family – show up in future French novels."
Thanks to Ms. Flood of The Guardian for this review.
