#CBR9 Book 10: "Faithful Place" by Tana French

Page count: 449 pages
Audio book length: 14hrs 8 mins
Rating: 4 stars

A spring evening in 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackie is waiting impatiently outside for his girlfriend Rosie Daly, as they plan to elope and move to London, making a new life for themselves away from the hard life of the Dublin working poor. When she doesn't show, Frank goes looking for her in the abandoned house a few door down, and finds a note that suggests she's gone off without him. As Frank's father is a violent drunk, his mother is neurotic and shrewish and his siblings aren't exactly anything to write home about, Frank's not really surprised, but he is heart-broken. He leaves Faithful Place, intending never to return.

Twenty-two years later, Frank gets a hysterical phone call from his youngest sister. They've found a suitcase behind the fireplace in that same derelict house where Frank found Rosie's note, and signs suggest that Rosie didn't in fact leave to go off to London to make a life for herself by her lonesome. Frank, now a detective on the Dublin Undercover squad, has to return home, even though every instinct tells him it's a bad idea. Soon he is back in the middle of his highly dysfunctional family's drama, determined to do right by Rosie Daly, whether the investigating murder detectives want him around or not.

Frank Mackie was a supporting character in the previous book in this series, The Likeness, and not necessarily a likable one at that. As with the other books in the Dublin Murder Squad series, this book can be read entirely independently and stand alone from the others, and frankly, only tangentially actually involves the Dublin Murder Squad detectives, because Frank is clearly ignoring them to conduct his own investigation into the decades old murder of his ex-girlfriend.

Tana French's murder mysteries are heavy on the psychological component and in this, the story is just as much about Frank reconciling his past and possible future with his very messed up family, as it is about solving the (after a while) two murders that are at the centre of this book. The middle child in a family of five siblings, Frank is the one who "got away", cutting off contact entirely that night he left to elope with Rosie. Even when he believed she'd abandoned her and their joint plans, he still left his home and family, putting himself through the police academy and wanting to be well rid of his entire dysfunctional clan.

The only family member Frank has had any contact with is his younger sister Jackie. He loves his nine-year-old daughter more than anything, and has tried to shield her from any mention of his past. It's also clear that Frank isn't entirely over his ex-wife, although as the book progresses, it's hinted that the reason their marriage fell apart may not just have been due to Frank's workaholic tendencies (this seems to be a common marriage complaint for the spouses of fictional cops), but also because he never entirely got over Rosie, always hoping that she'd reappear in his life from wherever he disappeared to.

The glimpses we get of Frank's adolescence and home life growing up is bleak as hell, and you can't really blame him for not wanting anything to do with his family, especially his father. The story of what happened to Rosie, as it's unravelled, is rather heart-breaking, although I was pretty sure I'd figured out the identity of her killer about halfway through the book.

I like these mysteries, but always think they drag a bit in parts. All three books I've read now seem to take a very roundabout route to get to the point. In these absolutely exhausting times, where I get depressed just from reading newspaper headlines, I'm not entirely sure I can stomach gritty, psychological crime dramas. I suspect I will get round to reading more of Ms. French's books, but not when in the emotional head space I am right now.

Judging a book by its cover: My audiobook came with the newer cover for this book, which I much prefer to the original one (the cracked, peeling paint of a derelict house, with the title and author's name seemingly painted on the wall). The little, abandoned suitcase and the open, empty road, suggesting the possibilities of travel and all sorts of unspoken potential. Which considering the contents of this story just twists the knife around that little bit more.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 132: "The Likeness" by Tana French

Page count: 553 pages
Audio book length: 22 hrs 30 mins
Rating: 4 stars

After a murder investigation that completely destroyed her relationship with her detective partner and best friend, Dublin murder detective Cassie Maddox moved to the Domestic Violence unit and took up target shooting to deal with her feelings of anxiety. She's therefore surprised when her boyfriend, Sam O'Neill calls her from a murder site, and asks her to come meet him, but to make sure she wears sunglasses and a hat or some such, to disguise her appearance a bit.

Once Cassie sees the victim, she understands not only why Sam sounded so shaken on the phone, but why he wanted her to come down in person. The murder victim looks exactly like Cassie, and her ID claims that she is "Alexandra Madison". This is impossible, as Alexandra "Lexi" Madison was a fake identity Cassie and her boss created from scratch for an undercover drug case Cassie was part of several years ago. The dead young woman could be Cassie's identical twin, only Cassie is an only child, with no knowledge of any family connection that could explain the similarities.

Her former boss from Undercover, Frank Mackay is also on the scene, bursting with excitement because of the crazy idea he's concocted. He wants to use Cassie's uncanny resemblance to the murder victim to go undercover, pretending to be "Lexi" and try to ferret out who the killer is by interacting with all the people in the victim's life. He wants to tell everyone that Lexi Madison survived her stabbing and has been comatose, giving Cassie time to study the victim carefully. Then he wants her to move in with Lexi's house mates, go to her classes and basically pretend to be her for a few weeks to see what comes up. Hopefully the killer will be so rattled, they reveal themselves in some way.

Sam is absolutely appalled. Cassie initially refuses, but Frank is relentless and uses every bit of his former hold on Cassie to cajole, lure and entice her. He's extremely observant and knows Cassie well, seeing how miserable she is in the DV unit and suspects there may be aspects to her last murder case she hadn't yet processed. Here she has another shot at helping to solve a murder, from a completely different angle. After the murder investigation (not being presented as such to the suspects) still has no leads after several days, Cassie agrees to go undercover.

Having studied every piece of information they have on the victim, including very convenient cell phone videos, Cassie is able to learn the woman's inflections, mannerisms and habits and can also study how "Lexi" interacted with her house mates. The police have let the house mates (still among the primary suspects, despite water tight alibis) know that Lexi has short term amnesia, to help Cassie cover up any initial glitches when she is living among them.

Wired for sound and armed, Cassie is sent to the big house in the Irish countryside where the woman calling herself Lexi lived with four friends - Daniel, Abby, Rafe and Justin. She needs to convince these four highly intelligent young academics, who knew Lexi better than anyone, that Lexi isn't dead, she's just been in a coma after a savage knife attack. Neither O'Neill nor Mackay trust the house mates, for all that their stories all match up. They believe one or several of the friends may have been Lexi's murderer.

As days and then weeks tick by, Cassie's cover, although in danger a few times, seems to be holding. She settles more firmly in Lexi's skin, forgetting for a while about her past difficulties, her quarrels with Sam and her dreary job in DV. Lexi's friends are a strange bunch, fiercely loyal to each other and very stand-offish to outsiders. They are like family to one another, quite content to exist without interacting very much with anyone outside their little clique.

For a time, Cassie allows herself to almost forget her role as a detective and her duty, but I was never able to distance myself from the gigantic lie the police were feeding these people. Believing their dear friend almost died, then came back to them, they were all in for such a crushing blow when the truth came out. Four young intellectuals, so determined to forge their own path. Spending their evenings and weekends redoing the old house, or reading, discussing or playing cards. No TV or computers or smart phone apps. Lexi's phone seemed to have been used as a video camera, but none of the group liked using computers or only modern technology. There's something both incredibly pretentious and quite admirable about that.

As with In the Woods, this book is more about exploring psychology and questions around identity and personality than a straight up murder mystery. The plot demands a pretty serious suspension of disbelief; that based on nothing but medical records, photos, files and some phone videos, Cassie was so good at impersonating another person that not one of the four people who knew her best caught onto her being an impostor. That's after the massive coincidence that the murdered woman looked exactly like Cassie, down to height, build, hair colour, facial features, even hands and teeth AND had assumed her abandoned undercover identity. Because the story entertained me, and Cassie was one of my favourite characters in the previous book, I was willing to go along with it.

Of course, Cassie as a supporting character, seen through the eyes of her best friend (the books are all first person) is different from Cassie as the protagonist, having gone through some tough stuff in the last six months. French's protagonists aren't really all that nice, they are flawed in many ways. That's what makes them seem so real. I had real trouble with some of the choices and decisions made by Rob in the last book, I didn't always agree with Cassie in this one. But I still liked her more. While I don't love these books as much as Narfna/Ashley does, I am enjoying them a lot, and the audio narration for this one was truly excellent. I will be reading more of these in the new year.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 126: "In the Woods" by Tana French

Page count: 592 pages
Audio book length: 20 hrs 23 mins
Rating: 4 stars

This book, which is quite long (longest audio book I've listened to to date) gives the readers two mysteries for the price of one. Back in 1984, three 12-year-olds went missing in the wood of a Dublin suburb. Search parties eventually found one of them, Adam Ryan, clutching a tree trunk in catatonic terror, several rips at the back of his t-shirt and his shoes filled with blood. His two friends, however, were gone without a trace. Adam didn't remember anything since entering the wood in the afternoon.

Twenty years later, Adam Ryan goes by his middle name, Robert, and is a murder detective on the Dublin Murder Squad. He keeps his past secret from his colleagues, with the exception of his partner and best friend, Cassie Maddox. He still doesn't remember anything from that fateful day, and prefers to keep it that way. Rob and Cassie find themselves as the primary investigators of the murder of a young girl, found beaten, strangled and left on a sacrificial altar at an archaeological site in Rob's old home town. The case, when they start investigating, bears a lot of parallels to the disappearance of Rob's two best friends, but despite this, Rob insists on keeping his connection to the earlier case secret from his colleagues and claims he's fine to continue investigating the murder.

The case turns out to be a tricky one. Katy, the young victim, was a talented ballet dancer, about to go off to the Ballet Academy on a full scholarship. Her abilities had garnered a lot of press attention - could she have been killed by a crazed fan or a paedophile? Katy's father had received threatening phone calls due to his involvement with the "Move the Motorway" campaign, trying to protect the archaeological remains from a scheduled motorway expansion. Ryan and Maddox also get seriously off vibes from Katy's family, with Katy's twin Jessica being nearly catatonic, the older sister Rosalind strangely anxious and overprotective, the mother being nearly indifferent and the father with clear anger issues.

As the investigation progresses, Ryan is forced to delve into his past, gradually uncovering snippets of memory as he walks the streets and countryside of his old home. Can Katy's murder shed a light on the unsolved mystery of his friends' disappearance? Will Ryan crack under the stress he's experiencing, before either case is solved?

I rarely read mystery novels anymore, but my book twin on the internet Narfna/Ashley loves Tana French's books so much and recommended the audios when I got concussed. While I don't think I loved the book quite as much, it was an entertaining read, and Steven Crossley, the narrator, does a really good job. The reason I can't unreservedly love the book is partly due to the length. This is a police procedural, which really does go into minute detail about all the aspects of a murder investigation. Sometimes I think maybe too much time was spent on investigating things that went nowhere.

My main gripe with the book is the protagonist, Rob himself. I was deeply uncomfortable with his decision not to tell his superiors about his connection to the old case. As the investigation went on and he started going more and more off the rails, I also felt he should have been astute enough to step back and stop seriously jeopardising the whole case. He started making some bad choices and kept going making worse and worse ones. I loved his friendship with Cassie and absolutely hated where his breakdown caused them to end up. Because I spent quite a lot of the book wanting to shout at or punch Rob in the face, it was difficult for me to entirely care if either of the cases actually got solved.

I really liked that the book wasn't mainly a who-dunnit, that so much of it was a psychological study. For anyone who wants clear-cut, set in stone answers, this book is probably going to be deeply frustrating. I can very much believe that there isn't always an easy answer in real life murder cases, though, so I didn't really mind that aspect. I loved Cassie, and really liked Sam O'Neill, the other detective who helps investigate the case. I was really intrigued by where the case ended up going, but Rob's poor lack of judgement kept me from more than just liking this book. The next book in the series is apparently all about Cassie, though, so I will be getting that one just to spend more time with her.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.