Broken Harbor by Tana French

Richie closed the door behind us. He stayed beside it, sheaf of pointless paper hanging forgotten from one hand, eyes skittery as a corner boy's. That was what he looked like: some malnourished scumbag hunched against a graffitied wall, standing lookout for small-time dealers in exchange for a fix. I had been beginning to think of this man as my partner. His skinny shoulders braced against mine had begun to feel like something that belonged. The feeling had been a good one, a warm one. Both of us made me sick.

-Broken Harbor

Let's try this again, shall we?

So, I've missed a bit. (A year is a bit, yes? A long bit, but still.) I tackled Proust for the first time, finally conquered Team of Rivals, and enjoyed books by Mary Roach, Jo Nesbø, and Gillian Flynn. I will probably never get around to writing about any of them, and that's okay, I think. Fresh start.

It's fitting to start back with Tana French, a perennial favorite of mine. Broken Harbor follows Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, another member of the Dublin Murder Squad. Mick has shown up in previous books by French, though I must confess he didn't make much of an impression on me. Still, I think you're bound to remember a nickname like Scorcher.

Mick is called up to investigate a grisly case in the once-booming housing development of Brianstown. A family has been attacked, with definite fatalities. It's a high-profile case, a chance of redemption for Mick, who botched an investigation a few years earlier. It also (in classic French fashion) forces Mick to confront a painful time from his past, back when Brianstown was a seaside holiday spot called Broken Harbor.

The case was a bit of a toughie for me--I don't love reading about murdered children, funnily enough--but overall I found Broken Harbor to be more satisfying than Faithful Place. It's sad, to be sure. If there's one thing I've learned about Tana French books, it's that a happy ending is relative. Her detectives may solve their cases, but it's always at a grievous cost. Her books are fantastically written, perfectly paced, and deeply sad. Quite a recommendation, I know.

Up next: Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. Go big or go home, yeah?

Faithful Place by Tana French

I had spent my whole life growing around a scar shaped like Rosie Daly's absence. The thought of that lump of scar tissue vanishing had sent me so light-headed and off balance that I ended up doing gobsmackingly moronic things like getting hammered with my siblings, a concept that just two days earlier would have sent me running screaming for the hills. I felt it would be a good idea to get my bearings back before I did something dumb enough to end in amputation.

-Faithful Place

Readers first met Frank Mackey in Tana French's novel The Likeness, where he was introduced as an Undercover detective and former mentor of our heroine, Cassie Maddox. In Faithful Place, the story becomes Frank's when he's called back to his childhood home in inner-city Dublin, a place he long ago fled. The reason he returns? A forlorn blue suitcase, shoved up the chimney in an abandoned house more than twenty years earlier, only recently rediscovered. It once belonged to Frank's first love, Rosie Daly.

After dating secretly for months, they decided to run off together, Frank and Rosie, away from the hardscrabble Faithful Place. Frank waited hours on the night they were supposed to meet, eventually finding an unaddressed note from Rosie in which she said she'd gone to England. Frank assumed it was for him, that she'd decided to leave on her own. He didn't go home, though. He went ahead, not to return to Faithful Place until the suitcase brought him back. He'd never thought that Rosie might have met a bad end. It's a shattering idea.

Frank begins sniffing around the old neighborhood, asking the questions he'd never thought to ask: who might have known he was dating Rosie? Who could have seen her that night? He can't be part of an official investigation, of course. But he's soon drawn back into the rhythm of Faithful Place, where every resident knows exactly what's going on in every other home and is pleased as punch to keep that information from the pigs. His own home is worse: his brothers and sisters never got out, his alcoholic father still has everyone walking on eggshells.

It's a pretty grim situation for Frank, but very well realized by Tana French.  Her characters, from Frank's sharp Ma to his sly brother Shay to a chavvy old friend of Rosie's, are vividly drawn. I think her writing is up to the caliber she's maintained in previous books, certainly. All the same, I found Faithful Place slightly less satisfying than I did In The Woods or The Likeness. Partly, to be fair, because I hoped for an update on Cassie and/or Rob when none was forthcoming; that was a bit disappointing. However, I wasn't entirely happy with the resolution to the mystery. I can't put my finger on it exactly, I just didn't care for it. I'm still quite curious to see what French tackles next, though. This book only came out in July, so I suppose I'm in for a bit of a wait. (Still hoping for a book from Sam's point of view!)

Up next: The Guinea Pig Diaries, a collection of essays by A.J. Jacobs, who has written two excellent non-fiction books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically.

The Likeness by Tana French

He froze the frame on Lexie, head turned over her shoulder to say something, eyes bright and mouth half open in a smile. I looked at her, soft-edged and flickering like she might fly off the screen at any second, and I thought: I used to be like that. Sure-footed and invulnerable , up for anything that came along. Just a few months ago, I used to be like that.

"Cassie," Frank said softly. "Your call."

For what seemed like a long time, I thought about saying no. Back to DV: the standard Monday crop of the weekend's aftermath, too many bruises and high-necked sweaters and sunglasses indoors, the regulars filing charges on their boyfriends and withdrawing them by Tuesday night, Maher sitting beside me like a big pink ham in a sweater and sniggering predictably every time we pulled a case with foreign names.

If I went back there the next morning I would never leave. I knew it as solid as a fist in my stomach. This girl was like a dare, flung hard and deadly accurate straight at me: a once-off chance, and catch it if you can [...]

"Tell me this woman smoked," I said.

-The Likeness

The Likeness picks up six months after the events of In The Woods (see the previous post), and I'm going to do my best to tell you about the former without revealing too much about the latter. A bit tricky for a sequel, but here goes.

The Likeness, by Tana French, is not a particularly conventional sequel, anyway. In The Woods covered a Murder investigation led by detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, told from Rob's point of view. Cassie tells the story of The Likeness, leaving Rob mostly out of the picture. Still recovering from the outcome of her last case in Murder, Cassie has arranged for a transfer to Domestic Violence. One day she gets called to a crime scene by Murder detective Sam O'Neill. There's a body she needs to see.

The dead girl bears an uncanny resemblance to Cassie, and they share more than that. Her college ID shows that she went by the name of Lexie Madison - the same name Cassie used when she was working undercover years earlier. Cassie's boss from undercover, Frank Mackey, is at the scene as well, and he has a crazy idea: What if the detectives pretended that Lexie had pulled through, and stuck Cassie back into her life to suss out the killer? "We've got the chance to investigate a murder from the inside," Frank says with a grin.

Cassie's resistant at first, but Frank gradually wears her down, and after feverishly studying everything from local geography to subtle body language (luckily Lexie left a cache of videos on her phone), Cassie's walking up to Whitethorn House, her new home - and possibly the home of Lexie's killer.

Lexie lived with a tightly knit group of doctoral students - Daniel, serious and aloof; skittish Justin; beautiful Rafe, with the quick temper; and warm, motherly Abby. They were each other's family. Cassie's job is to live with them for a few weeks and pick up as much as she can about who Lexie Madison really was and who might have had it in for her.

It's an unusual premise for a mystery, and though I missed Rob a bit*, I quickly became just as absorbed in The Likeness as I was with In The Woods. Like Cassie, the reader is drawn in to Lexie's weirdly close group of friends (a little Googling reveals I am not the first to see a comparison to The Secret History) and wants to know what secrets they are keeping. The undercover angle ratchets up the suspense, and the more we learn, the more dangerous the situation seems. It ends more neatly than In the Woods did, but certainly leaves the door open for further adventures with the Dublin crew. Maybe Sam will get a story? That just occurred to me, and I love the idea. Fingers crossed.

Up next: At long last, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Very much looking forward to it.

*Okay, a lot - I'm very curious about what he's up to.

In the Woods by Tana French

I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives knew each other's every thought as surely as ballet partners in a pas de deux. I never knew and never will know whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

-In the Woods

Readers of In the Woods will soon discover that Detective Rob Ryan never should have taken the Katy Devlin case. Katy, an aspiring ballerina from the town of Knocknaree in Ireland, is found dead at a local archeological dig. She was murdered, and rookie Murder detective Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are the only ones around when the call comes in. There's a brief window of time when Rob could have taken his supervisor aside, explained the unusual circumstances, and passed the case on to someone else. He didn't.

And as much as we realize the potential fallout of this decision, it's easy to understand why Rob felt he had to take the case. For Detective Ryan, now working in Dublin, grew up in Knocknaree - and he didn't always go by Rob. Twenty years earlier, long before he ever could have imagined becoming a detective, he was called Adam. He spent many a happy day in Knocknaree, roaming the countryside with his two best mates, Jamie and Peter. And then one day, the merry trio went into the woods and didn't come back in time for tea. Their parents waited, and worried, and finally they called the police. Adam was eventually found, catatonic, with no memory of his time in the woods - and little memory of anything before it, for that matter. His shoes were filled with blood that didn't match his blood type. Jamie and Peter were never found. Adam was quickly sent to boarding school, where he acquired a posh new English accent and began to go by his middle name. He left Knocknaree behind and became a detective, working his way up to the Murder squad. "I have serious trouble with murdered children," he confesses, to no one's surprise.

"I'm fine with [the case]," Rob tells Cassie - "Just kick me if I get too moody." Of course, it's not quite so simple as that. After all, as more than one person reasons, what are the odds of two child killers haunting the tiny Knocknaree? I don't think I'm spoiling things if I note that Rob doesn't handle it nearly as well as he had hoped, and he has more and more trouble with his detective work. Cassie is left to worry and persevere with the third detective assigned to the case, the dogged yet seemingly naive Sam O'Neill.

I initially had little interest in reading In the Woods because - like Rob - I don't like cases in which children are killed. However, my aunt sent me the sequel, and it looked good enough that I felt I should go back and read the first book. I'm so glad I did. I found myself completely spellbound - it took a lot of effort to pull myself off the train each morning and not just ride to the end of the line and back again until I finished. I actually finished it Wednesday afternoon and would have written a lot sooner had I not gotten caught up in Hamlet.

So what made it so captivating? I think part of it, certainly, was the idea of the cold case being connected to the new one, which often makes for a good premise. And, of course, it always ups the ante when the detective has a personal stake in a case - especially when you become invested in that detective's well-being, as I was with the increasingly tortured Rob. Combine that with Tana French's excellent writing - occasionally a little too cutesy for me, but in general I found it quite good - and you can begin to see how I couldn't put it down.

French doesn't tie things up too neatly - which, while it can be frustrating, I appreciate for its realism. It is helpful that she appears to be envisioning Rob and Cassie's stories as a series - sequel The Likeness focuses on Cassie, but I've read that French has said she's not done with Rob. It's great news, as I feel there's a lot more of his story to tell. I've skimmed some reviews and found that quite a few find Rob unlikeable. I would be a bit kinder and add him to the list of damaged detectives. I don't mind a hero who makes mistakes - even big mistakes - if they make sense for the character. In this instance, at least, it certainly makes for a thoroughly engrossing story.

Up next: Reading The Likeness, of course!