More Tana French

Sometimes, it is easy to revert to the pre-teen I was decades ago when I sat at the dining room table, occasionally looking outside to see what was never going on in the back yard, and devoured Nancy Drew books.  I tried to read everything else that Tana French has written over the past few weeks.  What I like about her approach to murder mysteries are (1) they're set in and around Dublin and she gets in idiomatic speech right; (2) she weaves in cultural family imprinting, highly Catholic and clannish; (3) all of her lead inspectors have almost fatal flaws ...  she does not make them infallible superheroes of truth and justice and the Irish way; and (4) her stories interweave Ireland's economic highs and lows as factors and influences in the personalities, outlooks and motives of all her characters.

So I plodded on through books over 400 pages each:  Broken Harbor, Faithful Place, and The Likeness.  And then came to a screeching halt with The Secret Place.  And what is so off-putting about this one?  It's the girls.  Set in St. Kilda's school, the Garda is going back to a year old case, the death of a teenage boy from a neighboring school found on Kilda's campus.  The case reopens when the daughter of the investigator in Faithful Place reports that an unknown classmate knows more about the crime.  I just tried to find the quote where Tana has the ranking investigator characterize the female students because she wrote exactly how the story struck me:  a dozen or so catty 15 or 16 year olds, only marginally different from each other, in such minor ways that the reader does not care.  As a result of this blob of girls, no person emerges as a focal point.  It is like reading one of those socially correct books that junior high teachers think teenagers need to read.  Well, adults don't.  Being set in a school does not help to delineate a crystal-clear place and time like the decaying yuppie wanna be neighbor along the coast in Broken Harbor, or the Southie style old neighborhood in Faithful Place, or the forced fixer upper in The Likeness.  All of Tana's award-winning fortes of a great author have been abandoned in this effort.  Hope she returns to her old ways.

The rains will keep me out of my garden and impel me to the library as I return unfinished The Secret Place and seek out more challenging things to read.