The Trespasser and The Secret Place

The Trespasser

by Tana French

★★★★☆

No one does a slow burn mystery like Tana French. I love her Dublin murder squad series so much and each time a new book comes out I am beyond excited. She doesn't just write mysteries, she writes beautiful literary fiction that happens to include a mystery. Each of the books in the series is connected but works as a standalone. 

The Trespasser gives us a glimpse into the life of Antoinette Conway, who we met in The Secret Place (book 5). She and her partner, Stephen Moran, are assigned to a murder case at the end of a long shift. They find Aislinn, a lovely young woman, murdered in her home. Rory, a boyfriend, is an obvious suspect, but they have a few other theories to follow. Throughout the investigation Conway has to fight against the prejudice of her own coworkers and her own doubts about herself.

I tried to go slow and savor the story, but I loved every second of it. The atmosphere she creates is palpable and the anxious feeling builds as we get closer to the truth. She writes the best scenes I’ve ever read of detectives interviewing their suspects.

BOTTOM LINE: I’ve yet to be disappointed by French’s work. I liked this one ever more than her last. She gets inside the mind of her characters so completely that it’s easy to forget that she switches her main character in every book!

“No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you're nothing on your own and you're a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist at all. And that doesn't just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I'd do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved goodbye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I'd still be the same person I am today."

The Secret Place

by Tana French

★★★★

The fifth book in the Dublin Murder Squad series focuses on Stephen, who we met in Faithful Place. He's desperate to join the squad. When Holly, the young girl in Faithful Place, now seven years older, gives him a tip about a murder committed in a local prep school, he sees his chance to work with the murder squad. Holly and her three best friends, Julia, Selena, and Rebecca, all become suspects. This novel flashes back and forth between Stephen and Antoinette Conway's investigation in the present and girls' point-of-view during the months leading up to the murder.

BOTTOM LINE: This one felt different from the other books because of its focus on teenage girls and their intense emotions. It wasn't my favorite in the series, but I just love French's writing. She creates tense and enthralling novels each time, even though the characters and plots are never the same.

“That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would've been sad about us, sad for us, only they'd heard it all so many thousand times before.”

“It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.” 

BOOKS 1-4

In the Woods

The Likeness

Faithful Place

Broken Harbor

Commonwealth and Did You Ever Have a Family

Did You Ever Have a Family                     Commonwealth

By Bill Clegg                                              by Ann Patchett

★★★★                                                       ★★★★

Sometimes you read similar books close together and can't help but compare them. It happened to me a couple years ago when I read TheLikeness and The Secret History. I enjoyed them both, but the plots were so similar. I couldn’t help but have a clear favorite.

That happened again last month when I read the novels Did You Ever Have a Family and Commonwealth back-to-back without realizing how similar they are. Both books revolve around a tragedy. In one book it happens in the present and in the other it happened in the past. Both books tell the story from the point of view of many different people who are connected to the story. Both deal with grief, loss, broken marriages, and children whose relationships with their parents are beyond complicated.

They were both excellent novels, but with different strengths. I read Did You Ever Have a Family first, so I think it had a clear advantage. I wasn’t comparing it to anything else while reading it. Once I started Commonwealth I kept thinking back to the plot of the first book. I think Commonwealth was the more beautifully written of the two. I love Patchett’s work. She creates such incredible characters with depth and complex feelings.

Clegg’s novel is centered on the events that happen the night before a wedding. The bride and groom and other family members are killed when a gas explosion destroys their house. The mother-of-the-bride is the only one to survive. We are narrowed in to see the repercussions of one event. We flash back to the past for some context, but the main focus is the ripple effect of the explosion.

In Commonwealth the tragedy isn't revealed until you’re immersed in the novel. It’s less about one big event and more about relationships. An affair kicks off the novel and the main focus is the interactions between two sets of siblings after their parents marry. We get to know the characters through decades of their lives, winding through marriages and deaths, cross-country moves and crappy jobs.  

Both are excellent character studies full of regret abandon dreams, sickness, guilt, and all the messiness of life. I love that two very different authors can craft completely unique books that feel similar because of the themes.

BOTTOM LINE: I really enjoyed both novels, but they are unintentionally tied together in my mind.

Women NOT in Love

The other day I saw a great post that made me stop and think. It was a call for books about women that have absolutely nothing to do with romance. I was absolutely shocked by how long it took me to come up with a only handful of books. 

Think about it, how many can you think of off the top of your head? No young crush, no heartbreak leading to self-discovery, no casual dating, try to think of books that have no love in them at all. It's way tougher than it should be. 

The opposite doesn't seem to be true at all. I can think of a dozen books about men that don't involve romance. There are coming-of-age stories, thrillers, mysteries, and classics like Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness. There are so many! But when you hold up the same criteria for books with a woman protagonist, the options are scarce. 

I understand that love: having it, losing it, trying to find it, etc. can make a great story. But women are complex and there are a lot of stories to tell about them that don't include love. 

Here are the books that I finally came up with and honestly there's a couple that I think are questionable.

The Whale Rider, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Flavia de Luce series, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kinsey Milhone series, The Handmaid’s Tale, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, Still Alice, Wild, The Eyre Affair, Emily of New Moon, The Optimist's Daughter, The Thirteenth Tale, The Likeness, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, True Grit, Little Bee

What books could you add to the list? 

Added suggestions from you guys:  Nervous Conditions, Code Name Verity, Dolores Claiborne, The Gathering, The Year of the Flood, The Invention of Wings, We Were Liar,  Silver Sparrow, Matilda, Vanessa Michael Monroe series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Nightingale, Alice in Wonderland, Room, A Little Princess, Station Eleven, The Just City, and Gray Mountain.

Lovely painting by Jacquelyn Bischak from here.

Broken Harbor

Broken Harbor

by Tana French
★★★★

The best way I can describe Tana French's novels is that they get under your skin. The worlds she creates seem to give me tunnel vision, the farther I get into the book the more I'm wrapped up in the detectives' lives and their struggle to find the answers to their case.

This is the fourth books in the Dublin Murder Squad series, and features Detective Kennedy, a straight arrow. He's put on a dark case, a home attack that left a father and two kids dead and the mother in critical condition. The plot explores the cracks in our lives that aren't always easily visible to those around us. Kennedy's personal history and his troubled sister cause complications in the case as he tries to teach a new rookie the ropes.

I didn't love Kennedy as a character, but we aren't supposed to. He is rigid, seeing the world in black-and-white, but it's because he needs boundaries and fears what happens to those who spend too close to the edge.

This book follows the case of a murdered family, their history is slowly reveal as the detectives uncover pieces of their lives. One interesting thing about French is that she never feels the need to tie everything up with a nice pretty bow in the end. The murder mystery is always resolved, but issues in the detectives lives, other elements of the case, etc. are often left for the reader to determine.

BOTTOM LINE: Each of the books in the series works completely as a standalone. The Likeness remains my favorite, but every single one of them has deepened my appreciation for the author and heightened my anticipation for her next book. This one was no exception.

I save French's books to enjoy on vacation or times when I know I'll be able to dive into the novel. That's because she's one of my treasured favorite new authors to read and I ration her work. If you love a good mystery, with excellent writing, moody Irish settings and wonderful character doubt, you just have to check her out.

*Read as part of the R.I.P. Challenge hosted by Stainless Steel Droppings.

Faithful Place

Faithful Place

by Tana French

★★★★☆

Frank has worked in Undercover in the Dublin police department for years. It’s been more than 20 years since he left his suffocating home in Faithful Place and he’s never looked back. Now, decades after leaving in the middle of the night, he must return home to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart, Rosie. She was supposed to leave with him that fateful night, but she never showed up.

Frank’s family is the definition of dysfunctional. His overbearing mother, alcoholic father and hostile older brother make for an uncomfortable family reunion. He’s a bit closer to his other siblings, but has only kept in touch with one of them. The story flashes back and forth between the current case and Frank’s life 20 years earlier. Those were my favorite parts of the book; you fall in love with Rosie through Frank’s memories. As he returns to his old neighborhood we can see how broken he truly is. He’s become a shell of a man, driven by his work and not much else.  

BOTTOM LINE: As I’ve found with French’s other books (In the Woods and The Likeness), her writing transcends the plot. This isn’t my favorite in the series but that still sets it far above most books. She paints such vivid pictures of troubled people that you can’t look away until the very last page.

"They might be a spectacularly messed-up bunch and what they felt about me was anyone's guess, but the four of them had dropped whatever they could be doing this evening, put down their lives at a moment's notice and coming here to walk me through this night. We fit together like pieces of a jigsaw, and that felt like a warm gold glow wrapped all around me; like I had stumbled, by some perfect accident, into the right place."

"He held us up to see the lightning flickering above the chimney pots and told us not to be scared of the thunder, because it was just the lightning heating up air as fast as an explosion, and not to be scared of Ma, he was leaning out the window getting shriller by the second. When a sheet of rain finally swept over us he threw his head back to the purple-gray sky and whirl that's round and round in the empty street, Shay and me screaming with laughter like wild things, huge warm drops of rain splattering our faces and electricity crackling in our hair, thunder shaking the ground and rumbling up through Da's bones into ours."

I read this for the R.I.P. Challenge hosted by Stainless Steel Droppings.

Summerland and Gregor the Overlander

Do you guys ever read two books back-to-back that are unintentionally incredibly similar? I actively try to avoid doing this, but sometimes I don’t realize it until I’m already midway through the book. This happened to me a few months ago with The Likeness and The Secret History.

Now it’s happened again and like the first time, I can’t help but compare the two and favor one over the other. Both Summerland and Gregor the Overlander are about 11-year-old boys who find themselves in a strange fantasy land trying to rescue their fathers. There are definitely differences, but the basic premise is really similar.

Summerland

by Michael Chabon

★★★☆

I went into this one expecting a coming-of-age story about baseball. I’m not sure how I completely missed the fact that it’s a fantasy adventure tale. The other work I’ve read of Chabon’s has been for adults, so this was an interesting change of pace.

Ethan is an 11-year-old living in a quiet town in Washington. His mother passed away and his brilliant but distracted father (a bit of an absent-minded professor) is too caught up in his work to realize how much Ethan is struggling in their new home. He is on the local baseball team, but is a horrible player. Then one day he starts to see some odd creatures.

Soon he’s off on an adventure with his friend Jennifer T, oddball Thor and a strange collection of misfits, including a tiny giant, a Sasquatch, and other creatures. They can travel between the branches of the Tree of Life to the different worlds. They are traveling across the Summerland as they try to find Ethan’s father.

In order to pass through certain areas they must play games of baseball with the creatures that live there. I’m not a baseball fan, so that recurring theme made the book feel a bit long to me. I loved the other fantasy elements though.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s sweet and fun with a few darker twists. A perfect fit for teen readers, particularly those who love baseball. It’s a bit on the long side, but it’s a great quest book for young adult readers.

Gregor the Overlander

by Suzanne Collins

★★☆

I loved the Hunger Games series, so I’ve wanted to read this one for awhile now. I will say upfront that it’s written for a much younger audience than the HG books and that was hard to adjust to at first.

Gregor and his baby sister Boots fall through a passage in their laundry room of their New York apartment building. They find themselves in an underground world where rats and cockroaches talk and bats are used for transportation. They are in Underland and the people there refer to him as an overlander.

A prophesy tells of an overlander who will play a role in the future or Underland. The people there believe that Gregor must be that overlander and almost without his realizing it, a quest is formed and he is off on an adventure.

The plot and pacing are fine, but I never cared too much about the fate of the characters. It’s strange to read a book about an underground world and realize that the story didn’t even scratch the surface. I wish that we had a chance to get to know the characters a bit more instead of just moving from one bit of action to the next.

BOTTOM LINE: The book lacks the character depth that I grew to love in Collins’ other work. I think this would be perfect for a young reader who loves adventure stories, but it doesn’t work as well for adults.

The Likeness and The Secret History

Reading these two back-to-back was an odd experience. I had no idea they would be so similar but because of that I couldn’t help comparing them. Between the two I definitely preferred The Likeness, but they each had their unique strengths while essentially telling the same story. Both focus on a close-knit group of college students that must cope after a tragedy happens in their midst.

The Likeness

by Tana French

★★★★★

What a ride! As others have noted, you need to suspend your disbelief at the onset to accept the premise. Detective Cassie Maddox is called to a murder scene where the dead body of a woman virtually identical to herself has been discovered. What follows is an intense preparation and training for Maddox to go undercover as the murdered girl to try and discover who committed the crime. 

To complicate things, Maddox discovers that the woman has been using her old undercover alias, Lexie Madison. She was a college student living with four other students in an old house. The others have an odd symbiotic relationship and Cassie, pretending to be Lexie, must convince them that she’s the girl they know and love. 

The reason this book works so well, despite the far-fetched plot, is the characters. They are beautifully drawn and just enchanting. The world that French creates is an intoxicating one. Just like Cassie, I couldn’t help but get caught up in their strange situation. There’s no way Cassie would have become so enthralled by that odd “family” if she hadn’t had her spirit completely broken by her partner Rob in the series’ first book In the Woods. I missed Rob and Cassie’s easy camaraderie in this book, but I was glad she mentioned him so many times. He was such a huge part of her life and in a way this book is her way of grieving the loss of their friendship before she can truly move on with her life. 

BOTTOM LINE: A beautiful mystery that shouldn’t be missed. Read In the Woods first to understand the characters better, but know that this book is even better than that one! 

“I just believe that vices should be enjoyed; otherwise what’s the point in having them?” 

“I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories.” 

“I had forgotten even how to want something slow, something soft, something with wide spaces and its own sure-footed swaying rhythms.” 

“I wanted to drink and dance until a fuse blew in my brain and there was nothing left in the world except the music and the blaze of lights and the four of them surrounding me, laughing, dazzling, untouchable.”

The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

★★★★

This strange dark story starts with a murder and the rest of the book is a tense look at the aftermath. A group of students at a small New England college grow incredibly close when they enroll in a Greek study program under the direction of the illusive professor, Julian Morrow. Our narrator, Richard, is the last to join the tight-knit group and he has a hard time fitting in with the wealthy crew. The circle includes a set of twins, Charles and Camilla, the effusive Bunny, domineering Henry, and Francis. 

After the initial shock of the murder on the opening pages, the story behind it slowly unfolds, revealing a torrid tragedy of Greek proportions. Richard is the eternal observer, rarely initiating action, only reacting. It’s through his passive eyes that we see the events, which gives the whole book a detached feel. You can’t put it down, but you never feel connected, it’s an odd balance. 

The most fascinating part of the book for me was the eroding nature of guilt and the different effect it had on each person. The way we react to things says so much about our true natures. In that way it reminded me a lot of Crime and Punishment. 

BOTTOM LINE: An interesting read, one that will certainly stick with me. Honestly, I think that if I hadn’t read The Likeness directly after this one I probably would have liked it more. The two books are so similar in their basic premise, but The Likeness was the more engaging and enthralling of the two for me and this one suffered in comparison. I did like this one; I just loved The Likeness more. 

"But of course I didn't see this crucial moment for what it was; I suppose we never do." 

"There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial"

"... instead of merely loitering in the bullet's path like a bystander which I so essentially am."