By 6am Frank knows that Rosie won’t show and he leaves Faithful Place and his family never to return until a phonecall from his sister shakes his comfortable existance and turns everything he thought he knew on its head. They have arranged to meet there, unbeknown to their two families, and already have ferry tickets booked for their new life in England. The book opens with Frank waiting outside number 16 Faithful Place (the house at the end of the street he grew up in), at midnight, for his childhood sweetheart, Rosie. Frank made an appearance in The Likness as Cassie’s boss in her undercover operation, but in Faithful Place he take centre stage. He is hard-working, ruthless and comes with the baggage of an ex-wife, and child whom he adores and a highly dysfunctional family that he hasn’t seen for over 20 years. Yay me, I was right!įrank Mackey works in the Undercover squad in Dublin’s police force. I saved it to take on holiday with me as I just knew that I would be in for a treat and wanted something to look forward to round the pool. Having recently read and loved The Likeness, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Faithful Place. Frank embarks on a journey into his past that demands he reevaluate everything he believes to be true.” Until his sister calls to say that Rosie’s suitcase has been found. He’s cut all ties with his dysfunctional family. Twenty years on, Frank is still in Dublin, working as an undercover cop. The moment his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, failed to turn up for their rendezvous in Faithful Place, failed to run away with him to London as they had planned. Perhaps she has superpowers of her own? Whatever the source of her gift, it's only growing more miraculous with every book.“The course of Frank Mackey’s life was set by one defining moment when he was nineteen.
French does something fresh with every novel, each one as powerful as the last but in a very different manner. Faithful Place is wrenching to a degree that detective fiction rarely achieves. 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.
In French's novels, the person looking becomes the abyss. Detective fiction's legions of brooding sleuths have paid lip service to Nietzsche's observation that if you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss starts looking back. As in the previous two novels, Faithful Place has a murderer who will be identified, but in the process of discovering that truth, the detective's own psyche will be dismantled.
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