An experienced detective, Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy – being offered a chance to reclaim past glory following some vaguely hinted at disaster – is paired with a rookie detective to investigate. The setting, the characters, the language here are all pitch-perfect: heightened but utterly convincing rooted in the economic reality of the recession in Ireland but with a poetic lyricism. The Spain family is found slaughtered in their safe and middle class home in a housing project which was abandoned as the investments ran out surrounded by shells of houses and ghosts of what could have been: their children had been smothered the father, Pat, knifed to death the mother, Jenny, barely alive. This entry, however, I think is the strongest in the series so far.

I first read The Secret Place and loved it enough to gorge on the rest of the series which I continued to love – although Faithful Place has been a struggle to get into. This is the fourth of Tana French’s explorations of the fictional Dublin Murder Squad, after In The Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place. Take an atmospheric and intense setting, such as the last remnant of an ancient forest, a secluded mansion or a half completed housing project abutting the sea insert a handful of characters with intense and golden relationships raise the pressure and temperature remove from the oven when those relationships start to rip slowly and tortuously apart dust with a subtle hint of the supernatural. Recipe for a Tana French Dublin Murder Squad novel:

Broken harbour bound proof tana french