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Mar 31, 2011

karen rated it:

tana french and i have come a long way, baby...

and with this book, we are officially in love.

this is exactly the kind of book i was expecting from her. in the woods was great at the start and frustrating at the end, and the likeness was tons of fun for a staggeringly unbelievable premise. but really, really fun.

but this one is just great. i don't read a lot of mysteries, but when i read a good one, i get this glow of "ohhhhh - that's why people like these More...

20 comments like (47 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Tatiana rated it:

As seen on The Readventurer

It might be a strange thing to say about a murder mystery/psychological thriller, but Faithful Place is a very romantic book.

You see, Frank Mackey here investigates the disappearance of his first love who he for over 20 years thought dumped him and ran away to England. The whole narrative is laced with Frank's memories of Rosie and their teenage romance. I didn't quite expect it, but the story gave me goosebumps like only a very few teen novels abo More...

38 comments like (14 people liked it)

Sep 06, 2011

Jeanette rated it:

This is a murder mystery. Yes, it really is. Too bad the mystery gets pushed aside to make way for repetitive domestic fiction. Frank Mackey's family is of the Irish Catholic poorer class. The men are alcoholic and violent. The women are typical of any abusive family---placating, cowering, and above all, keeping the family secrets like good little enablers. Nothing new there. A bit of a snore, actually.

French's writing is up to its usual standards with regard to form, style, More...

17 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 19, 2011

Evie rated it:

5 Stars: Loved it

Tana French knocked her third book, Faithful Place, out of the park. It isn’t just any old whodunit sleuthing story, but a great, emotionally charged story about love, longing and dysfunctional families that definitely raises the bar in the mystery genre. Her voice is fresh and believable. The prologue completely sucked me and I had to buy this book. I don’t normally read prologues; they often seem weird and confusing to me so I skim the first few sentences, head str More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2010

RH rated it:

What French does best is ally you with her character's deepest wishes, and I was very involved emotionally in her other stories. When Rob in In The Woods desperately tried to solve the mystery of his own childhood the forest seemed to breathe back at him, and when Cassie in The Likeness fell in love with a utopian country house and its creators I understood her desire to stay and belong. Frank, on the other hand, is a swaggering divorced cop with an estranged family and lost first love, but wha More...

0 comments like (15 people liked it)

Apr 06, 2011

Sandi rated it:

I read both of Tana French's prior books in print and was really looking forward to reading this one as well. However, when I listened to the sample on Audible, I just knew that this one had to be listened to rather than read. Tim Gerard Reynolds does an absolutely perfect job with the story of Frank Mackey. I found myself listening at times when I otherwise wouldn't be listening to an audio book.

Ostensibly, Faithful Place is a murder mystery. However, it's really a story about More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2011

Megan rated it:

At this point, after reading Faithful Place I am pretty much an official Tana French fangirl and am afraid that all further reviews of her work will be reduced to inept gushing over how, like, totally awesome her novels are. These glowing reviews are also gonna include rants about people who dislike her books, how they are stupid fecking eejits who clearly aren’t reading these books the right way ;)

Seriously, though there are quite a few reviews of Faithful Place here on Goodreads wh More...

16 comments like (11 people liked it)

Sep 11, 2011

Kp rated it:

I'm only 1/2 way through, and I really like this book a lot. I'm trying to figure out what I like so much about Tana French, and I think it's that she is SO GOOD at portraying strong emotions in a character and also eliciting strong emotions in her readers - me! In this book Frank Mackey asks the question, "What would you die for?" I love the way he then expresses his love for Rosie that has carried through the years since he saw her. Then there is the nostalgia of childhood, fami More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 27, 2010

Travis rated it:

This book was a bit of a disappointment. I checked it out from our local library after reading a short but positive review in Newsweek, I believe. But I thought the praise was largely undeserved.

The novel's protagonist is an Irish undercover cop whose life is disrupted when the suitcase of his teenage sweetheart turns up in a abandoned ruin near where they were supposed to meet before eloping to England years before. In order to solve the mystery of what he increasingly becomes convi More...

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

Jun 28, 2011

Julie rated it:

Excerpts:

I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.
More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 28, 2011

Kristin rated it:

Tana French truly has a gift for writing. She's the kind of author who makes me so ecstatic that I can read. Her descriptions leap off the page. One that particularly stuck with me was about a back garden at night: “The dim orange glow coming from nowhere in particular gave the garden a spiky Tim Burton look." I can SEE that garden. French is smart with her many references, and she allows that the reader is smart too. Fantastic.

I thought Faithful Place started off much better th More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 10, 2011

Gloria rated it:

After recently having finished Emma Donoghue's ROOM, it was interesting to pick up this book and realize, Yes, the Irish have an innate ability to tell marvelous stories.

Faithful Place follows Frank Mackey, an Irish cop who's forced to go back to the rough, working-class neighborhood of his youth-- the place where his first love left him a "Dear John" letter, which compelled him to walk away from that life and never return.
Until now.
The discovery of her long dec More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 28, 2011

Sian rated it:

First time I have read anything from this author.

It started off quite slow in my opinion, didnt really feel like it was going anywhere...by about 100 pages I was into it and didnt want to put it down.

I really liked the main character Frank, he was very well written and a character that people could easily relate to. The Mackey family were truly awful and like Frank I would have ran from them as well.
I would have liked the book to have been in more than just his pers More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 16, 2011

Ngaire rated it:

I think this is my least favorite of French's books so far, but she did set the bar insanely high with In the Woods, and it's a bit unfair to expect her every book to be that good. Frank is a great character and the gut wrenching tragedy of this book is that he never suspects who the killer is, even though it's pretty obvious to us (or at least it was to me). I think what's wonderful about this book is the descriptions of working class Dublin and the people of Faithful Place. You feel like you k More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 14, 2010

Nan rated it:

I adore Tana French's Murder Squad series.

As with the first two books in this series, Faithful Place can be read with little or no familiarity with the series. The only crossover characters I recognized this time were Frank Mackey (obviously) and Cooper the pathologist. (By the way, I have to add that I love the fact so far that all three narrators in each book have asserted that Cooper hates pretty much everybody but likes each of them . . .)

This novel follows Frank Ma More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jun 01, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

Faithful Place, the third book by Tana French, is centered on Frank Mackey, an undercover detective that must go back home after 20 years and deal with his estranged family after the suitcase of his first love is found, revealing that she might not have left for England after all. Like the previous two novels, French takes us into the inner life of her narrator, revealing the ways in which the events and relationships of Frank's early life have affected his adulthood and throws us into his turmo More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 10, 2011

Jessica rated it:

I love Tana French's books. I was a little frustrated with the inconclusive ending of "In The Woods." But I've grown to like this unfinished finish style of French's. All the untied-up strings of "Faithful Place" felt very true to life, but there was just enough conclusion for the character of Frank. He seems to accept that his inability to control every outcome, that he doesn't know what the future holds, that he has to let certain dogs lie, and that running away doesn't m More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 10, 2011

Katie M. rated it:

While they're all good, I was not so impressed with The Likeness (book 2 of French's Dublin murder trilogy) as I was with her first one, In the Woods. But with this book - the final installment of the trilogy - French's writing is back with a vengeance and then some. Calling it a murder mystery doesn't do it justice - the mystery itself is sort of beside the point. It's about the characters and the relationships, and very few people do damaged, hardboiled, infuriatingly likeable protagonists as More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 10, 2012

Brigit rated it:

After reading her first two offerings I was fairly certain I'd love this one too, and I wasn't wrong. Loosely intertwined, each of Tana French's novels are ostensibly murder-mysteries, but more to the point they're a master course in character development.

She writes her characters beautifully. One thing I particularly love: the fact that no one's perfect. No one's noble to a fault. No one preaches and no one is 100% likable. Kind of like real life.

Faithful Place also add More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 24, 2011

Brian rated it:

Tana French's Faithful Place is the best novel I've read since The Garden of Last Days by Dubus. Her characters are chatty, complex, and compelling. The atmosphere is inviting without getting bogged down in minute detail. And of Dublin she writes, "this is the only city where I know all the little details, the short cuts, the slang, the sense of humor (nobody comes up with creative insults quite like the Dubs), the various neighborhood accents and their social connotations, the best plac More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 21, 2011

Kari rated it:

I've read Into the Woods and thought to give French another whirl. Again, the story line is ok, the characters ok, the writing ok. Nothing to rave about, but not a bad book either. It hasn't been gripping me, it's actually pretty easy to put down each night. If you liked Into the Woods you will probably enjoy this one as well. If you are more like me and thought Into the Woods was ok, well, I wouldn't bother reading this one too.

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jul 27, 2011

Steve rated it:

I really like how Tana French introduces a secondary character in one novel, then makes him / her the lead character in the next. Detective Frank Mackey returns to his family and the neighborhood of his youth after 22 years to investigate when the suitcase of his former girlfriend is discovered in an abandoned house. Frank had planned to run away with her all those years ago but when she failed to meet him as planned, he assumed she'd left without him. Find it @ the Orion Library. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 15, 2011

Jen rated it:

This book is good in terms of character development, motivation, domestic drama, etc. The way the mystery unfolds and the reasons for it is interesting.

However in terms of the actual mystery, it's very obvious from the beginning who the killer is. Disappointing compared to her last few novels where the mysteries were actual mysteries and the reveal was shocking and exciting.

I still love me some Tana French and her psycho-thriller mystery style though. I would buy her next n More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 29, 2011

Joy rated it:

Tana French has written a seriously good trilogy of mysteries, and the last one was my favorite. In fact, I've upped my rating to 5 stars after further reflection. Frank is the perfect character - flawed but pretty self-aware and decent - with a haunting past that sets up a gripping, twisting story that kept me up way too late. French is a gorgeous writer, and, mercifully, she's almost completely recovered from her crippling reliance on foreshadowing, which was my complain in the first two insta More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2012

Laura rated it:

I did enjoy this book; I tore through it in just about a day, in fact, staying up until 1am with a spoonful of peanut butter to sustain me in the dark hours. And I liked it, I really did! The problem is - I *loved* the other two books, not just for their characters and story, but for the sneak-up-behind-you-gutpunch quality they both had. In the first two, you're poking along enjoying a nice book, and then suddenly you're in the middle of an entirely different world, and all the things you th More...

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Dec 24, 2011

Ashland Mystery rated it:

Reading Faithful Place made me want to put all my Irish in my left arm and cut it off. I hated the book and couldn't put it down. It's Tana French's third work set in Ireland and was a finalist for the Edgar. The central mystery is the disappearance of Rosie Daly on the night that she and 19 year old Frank Mackey plan to run away to London. Frank can't forget the loss of his first love, wild and breathtaking, red-haired Rosie.

Faithful Place is the neighborhood where Frank grew up and More...

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Dec 06, 2011

Jaylia3 rated it:

I don’t know of any other mystery series that features a different character in each book, but I think that aspect of Tana French’s gripping, atmospheric Irish novels is one of the reasons her characters are so compellingly authentic—their actions, circumstances and personalities don’t require the distortion that eventually becomes necessary if one character is going to solve multiple, plot-worthy crimes. All of French’s books, Faithful Place included, immerse the reader in densely layered Iris More...

0 comments like

Nov 06, 2011

Heather rated it:

I didn't read "Angela's Ashes" when it was all the buzz, but I did read my fair share (if not more) of Joyce when I was younger, and I even took a college course in Irish literature; so I'm a bit stumped at why I'm so surprised to find that the Irish could school the Hungarians (and maybe even the Russians) on depression. Reviews on the back jacket of French's book talk about her unique "character-driven style." Having read three novels now, I find that her characters are all More...

0 comments like

Oct 27, 2011

Jennie rated it:

The Dublin Murder Squad is back - sort of. In this installation, narrated by Frank Mackey of the Undercover Unit, a disturbing discovery brings the detective home to his highly disfunctional family for the first time in 22 years. More family drama than detective novel (the mystery itself is pretty straight-forward), Frank's search for answers forces him to take a closer look at his own long-held beliefs and assumptions.

This book is by far my favorite of the three I've read. Frank is More...

0 comments like

Oct 18, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

WHAT is this book about?

Frank Mackey (who was introduced in The Likeness) is an undercover cop who doesn’t always play by the rules and cut ties with his family when he left home more than two decades ago. In the prologue, we’re with 19-year-old Frank as he waits for his love, Rosie Daly, to meet him in the wee hours of the morning on their street called Faithful Place. They plan to run away to England and make a new life for themselves—far away from their dysfunctional families and th More...

0 comments like