Faithful Place by Tana French

Faithful Place by Tana French

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Another in her series of Dublin murder detectives. Frank Mackey is called home to the slums of his childhood for the discovery of the body of his teenaged girlfriend.

This was excellent, and I sincerely hope to never think of it again after posting this. If you want to get technical about it, this was the weakest mystery qua mystery of the three books. If you're after a puzzle, this isn't the book for it, as the killer is apparent early on. The point is not figuring that out; the point is watching Frank struggle with it through his blinders.

Which is painful enough, but that's not what got me. What got me by the throat was the exact bruise this book placed its finger on: that thing where you see your parents again after getting out in some form or other, and you can actually feel your sanity peeling off you in strips as the old vortex sucks you down again. That feeling of becoming the awful person you are underneath, that they made you into, and that you thought couldn't possibly be like you remembered. That was so precise and vivid, and so precisely not a thing I can deal with right now. Cheers to French for getting at it so well, but yeah, no, I need to forget this ever happened.




View all my reviews