This is the third of Tana French's novels that I have read and I have enjoyed them all. This last installment is similar in some ways to the first two, but it takes the feel of the other two and moves in a new direction.
Faithful Place, unlike the first two novels, is less focused on the solving of a crime and more focused on the place where it happened and the people it happened too. Frank Mackey is a detective from Faithful Place, who left twenty two years ago and never looked back, of course, until now. The single sibling of four with whom he still speaks calls him in for an emergency: a suitcase has turned up in an abandoned house at it looks to be his high school sweet heart's case. The one who left him (and apparently the case) behind the night they were suppose to run away. Frank rushes to drop of his nine year old daughter back off with his ex-wife and heads directly for Faithful Place. We learn a lot in those opening pages.
The mystery of who killed Rosie Daly unravels slowly. And maybe it's a result of having read her other two novels so recently, I knew who did it relatively early. The beauty is it just didn't matter. French does such an amazing job with a slew of damaged, frightened, bitter, scared characters, most of whom are still on Faithful Place to this day, that the mystery takes second place behind the unraveling of all these characters. French treats them all with such honestly that even the most beastly among them is compelling and on some level understandable - not sympathetic - but understandable.
I have few quibbles with this novel, most probably aren't worth mentioning. There is however a revelation that seems a little too easy and the happily ever after potential unrealistic (especially given the rest of the novel), but it's a smaller side plot and not the main story. As heartbreaking and some of the other side plots end, they are true to what you'd expect from the people involved even though you hate that you even expected it, and I love an author who can pull that off without disappointing.
French's novel has a lot to do with family and loyalty, and the pain that comes with both. And yet it demonstrates beautifully why even when given an escape people continue to come back for more.
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