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 what he misses in this story is his divorced wife and child, cutting off the powerful melancholy that French harnessed in her other work. French's strength as a mystery writer is her nuanced characters and layers of understanding, but as they were lacking in this story it was doubly disappointing to figure out the killer early, which incidentally never happens for me. I hope her next story about Scorcher Kennedy is more personal for her and for us.