Faithful Place by Tana French

Ah, the cop with a traumatic past. It's a classic. Bonus points for having a dysfunctional family and a past relationship that has ruined his ability to connect with any other woman. Super double bonus points if he's a loose cannon at work.

Anyway, such a figure has been the basis for many a beloved thriller/crime novel, and Tana French's Faithful Place is no exception. The rogue cop in question is Frank Mackey, a minor character from French's second novel, The Likeness. Frank is an undercover specialist who has no fear of mingling with drug dealers and Dublin thugs, but is terrified of his own dysfunctional family. You can guess who, then, is the driving force behind his narrative.

Everything starts when Frank gets word from his sister (the one member of his family he hasn't completely shunned) that a suitcase was found in a crumbling house in the Old Neighborhood(tm). The suitcase just happens to belong to Rosie Daly, the girl with whom teenage Frank had made secret plans to run away from home in 1986. Rosie never showed up that night, and a wounded Frank moved on by trying to disappear (almost literally) into police work and an unhappy marriage. It's not an ideal life, but it kinda works for him, and he gets along on the thrills of his job and the genuine happiness his young daughter brings him. Then the suitcase turns up, and all hell (read: introspection) breaks loose when he's force to go back to his the neighborhood (Faithful Place) to figure out what the hell happened to Rosie. Did she ditch their plans and their ferry tickets to run off to London by herself? Was she a casualty of the ugly, booze-soaked underbelly of their blue-collar cul-de-sac?

The book moves back and forth between the ordinary love story of two blue-collar kids wanting to escape the Dublin projects (which makes it more Bono than Bon Jovi) and Frank's present-day struggle to accept the various possibilities of Rosie's abandonment. And looking into Rosie's disappearance means hanging around the old 'hood, which hasn't changed much--and his family, who have changed even less. At first, you think Frank might be exaggerating about the awfulness of the Mackeys--but then the obvious resentment they all feel (alternately shrieking and simmering) starts to create pressure in your own head by about a hundred pages in, and you start to understand why Frank would rather be punched in the face than go home for Sunday dinners. Drinking, emotional cruelty, neighborhood brawls, this crowd has it all.

As with her previous books, French's best work is in her characters. Frank is obnoxious, but likable (something I didn't think was possible after his first appearance in The Likeness). Even his collectively awful family has some positives as well, undercutting Frank's characterization of them as total savages. Rosie comes off as a little, well, rosy, but that's probably to be expected when she exists mostly as a flashback of first love.

And I still love her method of series-building--creating place and mood without confining her fictional world to a single voice/perspective. Of the three novels, I think Faithful Place is the best-written, start to finish. Frank's arc is most satisfying of all the protagonists', and French doesn't let the plot kind of sputter out like she does with the first two. This one does deal more in cliches (the aforementioned short-fused cop, the heavy-drinking Irish family, etc.), but the writing is layered, and constructed tight enough to distract from that. French works hard to refine familiar elements of crime/detective fiction, and mixes it all up so inextricably in her characters that it feels fresh. My biggest regret with this one is that now it'll be at least a year or two until her next one comes along.