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Faithful Place
Faithful Place
Tana French
Viking, 2010
416 pp., 25.95

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Lauren Winner


Book Notes

A dark new novel from Tana French.

If you've missed Tana French, go pick up In The Woods, then The Likeness, and then get her just-released Faithful Place. Each of the novels is narrated by a different Irish cop. In the Woods gave us young murder squad detective Rob Ryan; The Likeness starred Ryan's erstwhile partner, Cassie Maddox; Faithful Place follows Frank Mackey, the undercover genius who helped Cassie create her alter ego in The Likeness. "He was a legend," Cassie tells us there, "… the best Undercover agent Ireland's ever had."

Faithful Place takes us to the hardscrabble neighborhood of Mackey's childhood. He left behind his chaotic, violent family years before, maintaining contact only with one sister, but he's drawn back to the old neighborhood by the appearance of a mysterious, molding suitcase. Many years ago, Mackey had been dumped—or so he thought—by his teenage girlfriend. It turns out she hadn't skipped out on him. She'd been killed, her body and the suitcase she'd packed to run away with young Frank successfully hidden for decades. Much as Mackey wants to avoid his childhood mates, his criticizing mother, and his abusive, alcoholic father, he is compelled to help discover who killed his adolescent paramour.

Like French's previous two novels, Faithful Place succeeds largely because its narrator is a strong personality who picks you up by page 3 and never sets you down. It succeeds, also, because of the way French takes us into Dublin, a city trying to manage a decade or two's worth of staggering growth and increased cosmopolitanism. And, like its predecessors, Faithful Place succeeds because it is far more than a plot-driven suspense novel. In the Woods is a mystery in the conventional sense—crime, suspects, cops—but it is really about memory. The Likeness is also a mystery novel in the conventional sense, but it is really about identity. Faithful Place, too, is a mystery (though the criminal is a little easier to spot than in the two previous novels), but it is really about something else: it is about family, and belonging.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.


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