The voice is what grabs you first. It belongs to our narrator, Frank Mackey, a police detective in Dublin. Here’s Frank assessing the guy his ex-wife is dating: “(Dermot) can’t help looking like he lives life on the edge of a massive belch.” Or succinctly describing the slum neighborhood he was raised: a “hive of old brick and lace curtains and watching eyes.”
This is a tribute to Tana French’s extraordinary gifts, and her name should be writ large on every mystery lover’s must-read list. Her first novel, “In the Woods,” swept up the Edgar, Barry, Macavity and Anthony awards. “Faithful Place” is the third installment in her ongoing saga about the Dublin Murder Squad, and it is breathtaking — an elaborately twisted ballad of class resentments, family burdens, regret and passion.
The story alternates between the depressed Ireland of the 1980s and the depressed Ireland of the present day, which means that the country’s all-too- brief era of prosperity has been skipped over.
Though his beat is in Dublin, Frank has resolutely kept his distance from Faithful Place for all his adult life. But his siblings — two sisters and two brothers — still visit his drunken father and grim mother.
Frank is in sporadic touch with his sister Jackie, who calls one evening with news that upends his world: Builders have been gutting a derelict tenement on Faithful Place to sell the old fireplaces and moldings. They’ve found a decayed suitcase, stuck inside an upstairs fireplace. Soon after, a corpse is unearthed in the tenement’s basement and identified as Rosie Daly, Frank’s teenage love.
Twenty-two years before, Frank and Rosie were supposed to run away to London and get married. Except Rosie never showed up the night of their elopement and Frank always assumed she’d had second thoughts and escaped from Faithful Place without him. Now, he realizes, she never made the break at all.
“Faithful Place” is suffused with an awareness of the stranglehold the past has on the present. To solve Rosie’s murder, Frank must re-enter the maze of Faithful Place and ingratiate himself with family and friends he thought he’d exorcised long ago. (Given that Frank is a cop, the lack of enthusiasm about the reunion is general.)
More dizzying than the journey through the landscape of the past is Frank’s psychological trip back into the intense feelings of his youth. Not only does French write beautifully about Frank’s adolescent yearnings for Rosie, but she also vividly summons up the ego-stomping suffocation that Frank feels even now in the presence of his family.
By its devastating end, “Faithful Place” affirms the wisdom of Thomas Wolfe’s much quoted adage, “You can’t go home again.” But, brilliantly, it also affirms the dark knowledge of every great noir mystery: “You can’t escape home, either.”
Faithful Place, by Tana French, $25.95
