Come All Ye FAITHFUL

Currently the shining peak of Mt TBR here at CAP Towers, Tana French’s FAITHFUL PLACE has been garnering some tasty reviews, not least from Laura Miller over at Salon.com, where she describes French as ‘the Kurt Gödel of crime fiction’. Excerpts run thusly:

“French’s hypnotic storytelling remains in full force in this novel, despite having shaken off the dreaminess that suffused IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS. This is Roddy Doyle territory, an excavation of that particular torture experienced by those who want to break out of a hopeless, working-class world but keep getting sucked back in by the loyalty that is its one redeeming quality. FAITHFUL PLACE is wrenching to a degree that detective fiction rarely achieves: Frank -- a cocky devil who prides himself on his skilful lying and ability to play other people -- gets pulled apart psychologically as he pursues Rosie’s killer, and the reader undergoes it with him. By the end, it’s difficult to distinguish what the real crime is or who committed it …
  “Which is not to say that French doesn’t solve the novel’s technical mystery or that the answer isn’t tightly cinched into her larger themes. Like Kate Atkinson, who has grafted the contemporary novel of manners onto the bones of the detective story in her Jackson Brodie series, French sticks to the genre’s brief while conveying it into new territory. But where the Brodie books are all pretty much the same in tone and subject matter, French does something fresh with every novel, each one as powerful as the last but in a very different manner. Perhaps she has superpowers of her own? Whatever the source of her gift, it’s only growing more miraculous with every book.” - Laura Miller

  All of which is very nice indeed. For the full review, clickety-click here …
  So, the Big Question: Will we be hearing Tana French’s name being spoken in the hushed tones reserved for literary prize winners some day soon? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …