“The Trespasser” by Tana French

As you may have noticed, I am really into French’s novels. She does a wonderful job with writing mystery stories and creating characters that are borderline assholes, but still making you care about them. Her portrayal of Dublin is also spot on and demonstrates what Ireland is like, down to the most mundane details. I’m hooked.

In this latest installment, she focuses on Detectives Conway and Moran as they get their first real murder case that isn’t a simple domestic or bar fight. Conway is the narrator and often discusses how she feels alone on the squad as the only female D and the rest of the male D’s want her gone. This results in the added factor of having the detectives not trust their own squad and having to be careful around them as well as the witnesses and suspects.

In fact, at multiple points the reader does not know who to trust. This includes the various characters but also the narrator herself makes it abundantly clear that her knowledge is incomplete and often paranoid. Which really shows off how French can get right inside her character’s heads, so much so that you can point out their flaws and weaknesses.

What’s interesting in this book is also how it’s slightly different from her other novels in terms of how it ends. Most of her other books involve someone’s last case on the squad, as they have to leave or resign or whatever afterwards. This book is similar, but there’s a twist on it in that you think it’s obvious how and who are leaving, but then it changes and it alters again. Wish I could talk more, but you really have to read it for yourself.

As usual, a winner from French, and I hope she writes about this pair of cops again. She usually swaps protagonists every book, but I really liked these two. Usually there’s one or two characters that get reused book to book (Quigley seems to be incompetent in nearly every installment), so they might pop up again in the future, who knows.