Some people should never meet

This novel, the third in Tana French’s loosely linked Dublin Murder Squad series, features Frank Mackey, whom we met in the last novel, The Likeness. While he had an entertainingly caustic sense of humor, to me he was still your basic middle-aged divorced dickhead. In this book, the tone has shifted somewhat as Frank has to return to the old neighborhood and the past that haunts him still.

When he was nineteen, Frank and his sweetheart Rosie planned to escape their hardscrabble neighborhood and sometimes violent Irish Catholic upbringing.

“We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.”

They had saved up money for tickets to London and set a night to secretly meet, but Rosie never showed. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to believe that Rosie had run away on her own. Frank was devastated but tried to bury those feelings and go on with his life. Naturally he really never did recover as that early trauma set the stage for every relationship he had with women thereafter. When 22 years later a suitcase full of Rosie’s things (including those tickets for London) is found in an abandoned building, Frank is drawn back and eventually learns the truth of that fateful night.

Franks journey of discovery and ruminations on life and relationships kept me reading this novel, as I didn’t find the “mystery” of Rosie’s fate all that mysterious. I will still try the others in this series, as I do enjoy Ms. French’s singular voice.