Book Review - Faithful Place

I've read both of French's previous novels, Into The Woods and The Likeness, and quite enjoy how she takes a character from the periphery in an earlier novel and pushes him or her to the center the crime/conflict/relationship in the next novel. In Faithful Place, detective Frank Mackey's past gets stirred up when the suitcase of his former girlfriend, Rosie, is discovered in the chimney of an abandoned house they used to meet in during a renovation.  Heartbroken, he left their hometown and most of the relationships with his very dysfunctional family behind.

Frank, whose whole life changed the night he assumed she bailed on their plans to run away together, has since been  married, become a father, and eventually divorced.  .Now, he's determined to face his past and discover if something else might have happened that night. Maybe she didn't runaway to the big city without him. Maybe something much darker happened. Maybe Rosie never left town at all.

French's skill, in my opinion, is to allow the mystery of the crime to take a backseat to the development of her main character. The clues are still unfolding and the whodunit pushes the plot along, but the breakdown of her protagonists - their fears, prejudices, motives and skewed perspective - make it a much more interesting mystery to read. In this particular case, I listened to the audio instead of reading and the addition of a Scottish accent in my head made it even more engaging.

You don't have to start with The Likeness to understand the storyline of Faithful Place, but I think having read it beforehand and the additional glimpse it gives into who Frank Mackey is, made Faithful Place a more interesting book.