Faithful Place by Tana French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Got this book mailed to me via a pyramid-thing on Facebook. So it came from a friend-of-a-friend, and I have no idea if said friend related my reading tastes to the FoaF. I suppose murder mysteries drenched in Irish poverty-culture IS the sort if thing I’d read, but I don’t know if anyone knows me enough to discern that. Let’s call it a coincidence.
This one was a chore because I’m lazy. More pages than I’m used to, and a real book, not an e-book, so no staying up late with the lights off the soft glow of my Nook taking me through pages. But then I think Faithful Place goes on longer than it needs to, and drenches itself maybe more than it needs to. The book straddles the fence between good old fashioned who-dunnit and atmospheric sidewalk voyeurism.
There’s the main character, an undercover cop who’s really very good at his job, which is he’s happy to tell us. And thirty-year mystery, a skeleton found under a slab, a fresh corpse to go along with it, and a few twists to keep the reading happy. But that’s more or less it, in terms of mystery.
Then there’s the main character’s back story, which gets dredged up and all too quickly updated, and we’re assured that things haven’t changed a bit. We’re immersed in squalid streets of a poor Irish neighborhood, complete with alcoholic das, overbearing mammies, slappers and cans and cigarettes. Like an anthropologist hanging out with the aborigines. And to what end? Nothing’s different when all’s well and solved.
I’ve been given to understand that Faithful Place is the third in a series, but that each book features different characters. And so it’s a few poor Irish neighborhoods that are the main characters throughout. I don’t know, maybe Tana French is doing the modern murder-mystery version of Dubliners. Okay fine. But not my cup of tea, after all.
But for all that it’s well written, and not boring. Even a lazy reader like me managed to get through it in daylight hours and the occasional work break. Given all of the books that could have been Amazoned to me, I suppose things went fairly well.