Faithful Place by Tana French is 1.99

There are mystery writers and then there is Tana French. She’s been called our greatest living mystery writer and the Queen of Irish suspense. Her books are both superb genre fiction and literary fiction at once. Her Dublin Murder Squad books are excellent and Faithful Place is the best of the series. In my DIK review of the most recent book, The Trespasser (so good), I wrote:

Ms. French has written six books–the Dublin Murder Squad series–all with first person narrators, all loosely connected. My favorite of the set is Faithful Place. My second is her latest, the intricate and satisfying The Trespasser, narrated by Detective Antoinette Conway.

Ms. French’s books are always about a murder but they’re never just that. Each is also about a particular time and place, always in Ireland, and explores the lives of those in the Murder Squad. As her detectives slowly piece together the story of the crime, they reveal the pith of their own lives. Neither is straightforward and no one comes out unscathed.

Amazon describes Faithful Place thusly:

Back in 1985, Frank Mackey was a nineteen-year-old kid with a dream of escaping hisi family’s cramped flat on Faithful Place and running away to London with his girl, Rosie Daly. But on the night they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show. Frank took it for granted that she’d dumped him-probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother, and generally dysfunctional family. He never went home again. Neither did Rosie. Then, twenty-two years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank, now a detective in the Dublin Undercover squad, is going home whether he likes it or not.