Faithful Place: A Novel by Tana French

This is Tana French’s third novel, and she won the Edgar Award for her first novel, In the Woods. My wife suggested this, knowing I love detective/murder mysteries. While the plot is great, mostly this is a book about the relationships amongst the family members of a highly dysfunctional family from the poorest and most crime-ridden area of Dublin. The story is told in the first person from the point of view of the main character, Francis “Frank” Mackey, so the author, a woman, chooses to write from the perspective of a man. I thought that convention usually worked. At the age of 19, Francis is in love with Rosie Daly, and they both know they have to escape Faithful Place where they both have grown up, but the poverty, poor education, and hardships of the place act like quicksand to keep people from leading, force them to repeat the pathetic lives that their parents and grandparents led. The place is crowded, too many family members in every flat, everyone knowing everyone’s business, there are no secrets. But, Francis and the beautiful, vivacious Rosie have a plan to escape, a plan which they think they have kept secret from everyone. On the night they are to escape, Francis waits for Rosie, who never shows. Then, he discovers her note which he interprets to mean that she has decided to escape, but without him. Devastated by this turn of events, Francis chooses to leave anyway, without telling anyone. The Mackeys and Dalys, who have been enemies for years, are left to assume that the two lovers have eloped together. It is 22 years later that Francis is drawn back to Faithful Place, and in those years, he has become a detective in the Guards (about which we’ve learned so much from Ken Bruen’s novels), has married and divorced Olivia, and has a 9-year-old daughter, Holly. Upon his return home, he receives a very mixed welcome from his parents, two brothers, and two sisters. His ex-wife and daughter are drawn into the family drama, something Francis had worked for 22 years to prevent. Rosie’s body was discovered in a nearby derelict house, and there is clear evidence that she was on her way to meet Francis when she was intercepted and killed. Francis spends the rest of the book unraveling the mystery, which involves his family, only it is not clear how they were involved and who were the main characters. He has to unravel and understand the old rivalry between the Mackey and Daly families. There were good plot twists that I did not see coming, and the final mystery is not what I predicted it would be. The writing in this book was excellent, and there were passages that were gripping, such as the opening paragraph beginning with, “In all your life, only a few moments matter.” My only criticism was the length and depth of the extensive family interactions and dialogue, which I thought sometimes detracted from the plot, but that was the very feature that my wife loved. I think I’ll probably read French’s first book before I make a decision about where she ranks in my list of authors.