Review: THE TRESPASSER, Tana French

• 
  This edition a Kindle e-book (Amazon)
  
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B016IOF3O4
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hodder & Stoughton (September 22, 2016)
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 481 pages 
• Dublin Murder Squad #6

Synopsis (Amazon)

Being on the Murder Squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. Her partner, Stephen Moran, is the only person who seems glad she’s there. The rest of her working life is a stream of thankless cases, vicious pranks, and harassment. Antoinette is savagely tough, but she’s getting close to the breaking point.
 
Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers’ quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed-to-a-shine, and dead in her catalog-perfect living room, next to a table set for a romantic dinner. There’s nothing unusual about her—except that Antoinette’s seen her somewhere before.
 
And that her death won’t stay in its neat by-numbers box. Other detectives are trying to push Antoinette and Steve into arresting Aislinn’s boyfriend, fast. There’s a shadowy figure at the end of Antoinetteʼs road. Aislinnʼs friend is hinting that she knew Aislinn was in danger. And everything they find out about Aislinn takes her further from the glossy, passive doll she seemed to be.
 
Antoinette knows the harassment has turned her paranoid, but she can’t tell just how far gone she is. Is this case another step in the campaign to force her off the squad, or are there darker currents flowing beneath its polished surface? 

My Take

I nearly stopped reading this novel several times, and ended up being glad that I persisted, and finished it. The book took me well over a week to read - very unusual for me. It is a very long book too, but I solved the problem of the size by resorting to a Kindle edition.

Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran are struggling to work out why they were assigned this case. Perhaps it was because they were early to work. What does their boss have in mind? Antoinette suspects that it is her last chance to prove herself. Neither she nor Stephen have been popular with other members of the Murder Squad, and others seem to take great delight in sabotaging her work. And why did the boss insist they take Detective Breslin on their team? He seems to barely tolerate them.

On the surface this seems as if it could be a lovers' tiff gone wrong, but then the suspect seems wrong, and he insists that he has never entered the dead woman's flat. Gradually a different slant on the scenario emerges.

The detail in this plot is incredible, as is the insight into how detectives work.

My rating: 4.8

I've also read

4.3, THE LIKENESS
4.8, THE SECRET PLACE
4.5, THE WYCH ELM 

Review: THE WYCH ELM, Tana French

• format: Kindle (Amazon)
• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (July 30, 2019)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735224641
• ISBN-13: 978-0735224643

Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

WHAT DO WE HIDE INSIDE OURSELVES?

One night changes everything for Toby. He's always led a charmed life - until a brutal attack leaves him damaged and traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at his family's ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins.

But not long after Toby's arrival, a discovery is made: a skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden.

As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and himself.

A spellbinding book from a novelist who takes crime writing and turns it inside out, The Wych Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, if we no longer know who we are.

My take

An enthralling and very complex book.

Toby didn't really want to return to the Ivy House and he wasn't really sure why. After he was attacked at home and beaten almost to death, his memory had great holes. But the family thought that going to stay at the Ivy House would help in his recuperation and also solve the problem of someone being there to look after Hugo.

The discovery of the skull hidden in the wych elm changes all that and becomes a pivotal point in the novel. How recent is the skull? The elm has been there about 200 years. But then the identity of the skull is discovered and the question becomes one of who put it there. Toby realises it must be someone he knows and he is not even sure it isn't himself.

There is no getting away from the fact that this is a long book. It is made to feel longer by the fact that it seems to take so long to get wherever it is going,  and for much of the time the reader is not sure what the outcome will be.  You are not really sure of how much detail you need to hang onto. And some of the main characters are simply unlikeable. I even felt ambivalent about Toby himself. I kept thinking about how unobservant and self-absorbed he must have been when he was younger. And then, we are nearly at the end when something quite awful and unpredictable happens.

My rating: 4.5

I've also read
4.3, THE LIKENESS
4.8, THE SECRET PLACE

Review: THE SECRET PLACE, Tana French

• this edition large print published by Thorndike Press
• ISBN 978-1-4104-6978-6
• 842 pages
• first published 2014
• #5 in the Dublin Murder Squad series
• available for Kindle: Amazon

 Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago. The caption says, "I know who killed him".

Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's 16 and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story. Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets.

The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card. Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get it solved, he will have to work with Detective Antoinette Conway - tough, prickly, an outsider, everything Stephen doesn't want in a partner. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly and her three closest friends inhabit and disentangle the truth from their knot of secrets, even as he starts to suspect that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear.

From the multi-award-winning author of Sunday Times and New York Times best seller In the Woods, The Secret Place is a searing novel of psychological suspense.

My Take

I must confess that I originally started reading a copy of this from my local library, but at over 800 pages it proved to be a weighty tome, so I bought a Kindle version.

Detective Stephen Moran really wants to move from the Cold Case squad back into the Murder Squad which is why he decides to deliver the card which Holly Mackey has brought him to Antoinette Conway in person. Strictly speaking he should just hand the card over but he is angling for an invitation to sit in on wherever Conway's investigation takes her. Conway is excited with what looks like a breakthrough ina case that has been stagnating for most of a year.

It comes as a surprise to realise that the main events of THE SECRET PLACE take place in the space of a day. That is not entirely true because Chris Harper has been dead a year and some of the narrative predates his death by a further fifteen months or so. The various strands of plot lines are cleverly juxtaposed, almost seamlessly, although the reader is never in any doubt about which time frame they are in. From time to time the reader is told how much longer Chris Harper has to live.

The novel focusses on the girls at Kilda's boarding school who had most to do with Chris Harper. In that sense the questioning covers old ground, looking for something that Conway and her team missed in the days immediately after the murder. Solving the crime is incredibly important to Conway - she feels she is on the brink of being dropped from the Murder Squad. It is important too to Stephen  Moran that he establishes a good working relationship with Conway, and there are times when he fears he has messed up his chance.

The novel too is a study of how the teenage female mind works. It explores the spitefulness of gangs of girls in the closed boarding house atmosphere. It also looks at the damage that the events in the boarding house grounds have already inflicted on the school. But above all - who wrote the card and left it on the noticeboard, and, most importantly, who killed Chris Harper?

A complex and rewarding read.

This novel reminded me that I must read more from the Dublin Murder Squad series.

My rating: 4.8

I've also reviewed 4.3, THE LIKENESS

Dublin Murder Squad
1. In the Woods (2006)
2. The Likeness (2008)
3. Faithful Place (2010)
4. Broken Harbour (2012)
5. The Secret Place (2014)

Review: THE LIKENESS, Tana French

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 900 KB
• Print Length: 708 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0340924799
• Publisher: Hodder (September 4, 2008)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002V092CY
• Source: I bought it

Publisher's blurb

Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She's transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill, but she's too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl's ID says her name is Lexie Madison - the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective - and she looks exactly like Cassie.

With no leads, no suspects, and no clue to Lexie's real identity, Cassie's old undercover boss, Frank Mackey, spots the opportunity of a lifetime. They can say that the stab wound wasn't fatal and send Cassie undercover in her place to find out information that the police never would and to tempt the killer out of hiding. At first Cassie thinks the idea is crazy, but she is seduced by the prospect of working on a murder investigation again and by the idea of assuming the victim's identity as a graduate student with a cozy group of friends.

As she is drawn into Lexie's world, Cassie realizes that the girl's secrets run deeper than anyone imagined. Her friends are becoming suspicious, Sam has discovered a generations-old feud involving the old house the students live in, and Frank is starting to suspect that Cassie's growing emotional involvement could put the whole investigation at risk. Another gripping psychological thriller featuring the headstrong protagonist we've come to love, from an author who has proven that she can deliver.

My take

No review could ignore the fact that this is an extremely long book, and that it really took me about 10 days to read, which is a very long time for me.

Part of what makes the book so long is that we are given an immense amount of back-story for all the main characters. However I did feel that in one relationship at least, the one between Cassie and her former boyfriend Rob, we were not given enough back-story. I think we were meant to have remembered what happened in the first title IN THE WOODS, and that would have been fine if I had read THE LIKENESS while the earlier book was fresh in memory. As it was, I floundered.

The plot of THE LIKENESS is an intriguing one on two levels - first of all it is a murder investigation into the death of a girl who is calling herself Lexie Madison, an identity created by Cassie Maddox and her boss at the time Frank Mackey. Not only is she using that name, but she is the spitting image of Cassie herself.

The second intriguing plot line is the decision to plant Cassie as Lexie in the house where Lexie has been living with four other students from Trinity College. Cassie's under cover preparation is reminiscent of the preparation of a spy, and there remains the question of whether she will be strong enough and disciplined enough to carry out her assignment to find out who killed Lexie without becoming emotionally involved. There are bets on whether she will last. How long Cassie stays under cover will be determined by how quickly she solves the murder.

I found reading the book slow, but not particularly heavy, going. There is no doubt that it is well written. I just became impatient for the break to come. However the breakthrough comes and still the book doesn't end. I think the purpose of the final two chapters is to make the reader question whether we have actually got the story correct, and to send us back through the book to check aspects of the plot. This is not an easy thing to do on a Kindle, and my attention was a bit half-hearted towards the end.

My rating: 4.3

Other reviews to check

• Maxine Clarke at EuroCrime
• Dorte at DJ's Krimiblog
• The Book Whisperer

Other websites

• Penguin Reading Guide includes an interview with Tana French as when as discussion questions
• Read an excerpt on Tana French's website
• Reading Group Guides

Treading Water, metaphorically

This is not a review. That will come in a few days.
This is just an attempt to explain the lack of recent blog posts.

I guess we all go through times when we are just not reading as fast as we would like, and I'm wallowing through one of them now.

It is not that I don't like THE LIKENESS by Tana French. I do. But I just don't seem to manage to read much at a time. The writing seems very dense (or maybe it is my brain that is dense).

Add to that, that it is a very long book -708 pages in the made-from-paper-version and over 9,000 "locations" in the Kindle version - that makes it 3x the length of an Agatha Christie novel, and I'm only about a third of the way after a week.

Publisher's blurb

Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She's transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill, but she's too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl's ID says her name is Lexie Madison - the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective - and she looks exactly like Cassie.

With no leads, no suspects, and no clue to Lexie's real identity, Cassie's old undercover boss, Frank Mackey, spots the opportunity of a lifetime. They can say that the stab wound wasn't fatal and send Cassie undercover in her place to find out information that the police never would and to tempt the killer out of hiding. At first Cassie thinks the idea is crazy, but she is seduced by the prospect of working on a murder investigation again and by the idea of assuming the victim's identity as a graduate student with a cozy group of friends.

As she is drawn into Lexie's world, Cassie realizes that the girl's secrets run deeper than anyone imagined. Her friends are becoming suspicious, Sam has discovered a generations-old feud involving the old house the students live in, and Frank is starting to suspect that Cassie's growing emotional involvement could put the whole investigation at risk. Another gripping psychological thriller featuring the headstrong protagonist we've come to love, from an author who has proven that she can deliver.

I read IN THE WOODS at the end of 2007. Here is my mini-review (I rated it at 4.5)
Three 12 years olds are playing in the woods at Knocknaree and then there is one. The other two vanish and the remaining child Adam Ryan is in a catatonic state and remembers nothing. Life goes on but the two children are never found and Adam Ryan becomes detective Rob Ryan. Twenty years on the woods are to be demolished to make way for a motorway. When protesters assert that the woods are of archaeological significance they are given time to excavate and to retrieve anything of value. Then the body of a young girl is found near the excavation site, and Rob Ryan is part of the team assigned the case. He knows he should declare his conflict of interest but he doesn't. Gradually as the investigation develops the layers of his memory onion peel back and he gets closer to the truth.

Even more awards..

2008 Arthur Ellis Awards (Crime Writers of Canada) shortlist for the best in Canadian crime writing

Best Novel:
Linwood Barclay, No Time for Goodbye (Bantam)
Terry Carroll, Snow Candy (Mercury Press)
Maureen Jennings, A Journeyman to Grief (McClelland & Stewart)
Louise Penny, The Cruellest Month (McArthur & Company)
Jon Redfern, Trumpets Sound No More (RendezVous Crime/Napoleon & Company)

Best Short Story:
Vicki Cameron, "Eight Lords A'Leaping" in Locked Up (Deadlock Press)
Maureen Jennings, "Wreckwood" in Blood on the Holly (Baskerville Books)
D.J. McIntosh, "The Hounds of Winter" in Blood on the Holly (Baskerville Books)
Rick Mofina, "As Long as We Both Shall Live" in Blood on the Holly (Baskerville Books)
Leslie Watts, "Turners" in Kingston Whig-Standard (July 7, 2007)

Best Juvenile:
Anita Daher, Racing for Diamonds (Orca)
Anita Daher, Spider's Song (Puffin Canada)
Vicki Grant, I.D. (Orca)
Shane Peacock, Eye of the Crow (Tundra)
Drew Hayden Taylor, The Night Wanderer (Annick Press)

Best First Novel:
Claire Cameron, The Line Painter (HarperCollins)
Sean Chercover, Big City, Bad Blood (William Morrow/HarperCollins)
Liam Durcan, García¹s Heart (McClelland & Stewart)
Susan Parisi, Blood of Dreams (Penguin Australia)
Sharon Rowse, The Silk Train Murder (Carroll & Graf)
Marc Strange, Sucker Punch (Castle Street Mysteries/Dundurn)

Winners will be announced June 5th in Toronto. The awards are open to any writer living in Canada, regardless of nationality, and to Canadian writers living outside Canada.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edgar Awards for 2008

Best Novel

DOWN RIVER by John Hart (St. Martin's Minotaur)

Best First Novel

IN THE WOODS by Tana French (Viking) - see a note below on awards she has pick ed up so far for this book.

Best Paperback Original

QUEENPIN by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cartier Diamond Dagger

Sue Grafton will be awarded the twenty-third Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in the genre of crime writing at a dinner in London on May 7th.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tana French's awards for IN THE WOODS

• Best First Novel: Edgar Awards for 2008
• 2007 IVCA Clarion Award for Best fiction
• nominations for more

Missing Children

I am currently reading THE PURE IN HEART by Susan Hill. #2 in the Simon Serrailler series. The first real case in the book is the apparent kidnapping of a 9 year old boy as he stands on the footpath outside his home waiting for his ride to school.
And as Serrailler's assistant Detective Sergeant Nathan Coates thinks..
What can it be like to go out one morning and everything's hunky-dory, and at the end of the day, wham, your kid's gone, just... gone? Jesus.

Lying in bed last night, I started thinking about books that I've read that tackled this theme. A mental trawl of my database brought up these..

INVOLUNTARY WITNESS by Gianrico Carofiglio
Not an optimistic one because the boy is found dead and so the book is about the attempt to lay the blame.
A Senegalese peddlar working on the beaches of Bari in southern Italy has been accused of the murder of a young boy, whose body was found down a well 12 kilometers away. Guido Guerrieri, Counsel for the Defence, originally advises the accused to opt for a "short trial", a method in which the accused basically pleads guilty and gets a reduced sentence because of that. But the accused says he is not guilty and although he thinks the case is hopeless Guido also believes him. This novel is an Italian prize winner, translated into English. It is Carofiglio's debut novel, won a number of literary awards, and also already become the basis for an Italian TV series. Very different view of Italian justice system to Donna Leon. But then Bari is not Venice.

Then of course IN THE WOODS by Tana French
Three 12 years olds are playing in the woods at Knocknaree and then there is one. The other two vanish and the remaining child Adam Ryan is in a catatonic state and remembers nothing. Life goes on but the two children are never found and Adam Ryan becomes detective Rob Ryan. Twenty years on the woods are to be demolished to make way for a motorway. When protesters assert that the woods are of archaelogical significance they are given time to excavate and to retrieve anything of value. Then the body of a young girl is found near the excavation site, and Rob Ryan is part of the team assigned the case. He knows he should declare his conflict of interest but he doesn't. Gradually as the investigation develops the layers of his memory onion peel back and he gets closer to the truth. A strong debut novel that tackles an idea others have tackled before

BLACK SECONDS by Karin Fossum
Helga Joner has often thought that her nine year old daughter Ida is too good to be true, too good to last. The disappearance of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. When Ida fails to arrive home from the shop, Helga feels she had been rehearsing the moment for years. First Helga and her sister Ruth scour the streets where they might find Ida, without success, and then they ring the police. Helga feels that somehow she has tempted fate, setting off an inevitable chain of events.
When Inspector Konrad Sejer arrives at her house, Helga feels instinctively that he will find Ida. As time passes Sejer becomes concerned that no trace has been found of Ida or the bright yellow bicycle she rode to the shop. One hundred and fifty volunteers search for Ida without success. Eight days later there are still no clues, the search is to be scaled down, and a chance comment by Helga to Sejer gives them something new to work on.

from a couple of years back in my reading
NO TRACE by Barry Maitland
In this work Maitland turns his focus on an artistic community where one of the leading artists, Gabriel Rudd, has won England’s most controversial art awards, the Turner Prize, with a painting he completed after the death of his wife. Now his daughter has disappeared, and two other young girls have also gone missing at the same time. Rudd begins to work on an art installation based on the grief he is experiencing for his lost daughter Tracey.

and ON BEULAH HEIGHT by Reginald Hill
Andy Dalziel's worst case was when 3 little girls went missing at Dendale, a small community where a dam was being built. They were never found and Benny Lightfoot, the man suspected of their disappearance, disappeared without trace too. The valley was flooded and the crime was never solved. Most of the families moved into a neighbouring valley, and now, 15 years on, another little girl has gone missing. But little Betsy Lightfoot had survived 15 years ago, and now she has come back to the area. She was 7 years old when Dendale was drowned. And it seems too that Benny is back.