The Mad Professah Lectures

Tana French is on my short list of must-buy authors. These are the authors who when you hear they have a new book coming out you think, “I must buy that!” It is a rather short list: French, Peter F. Hamilton, James S.A. Corey and Richard K. Morgan. My must-read list of authors is much longer. The reason why Tana French is one of the authors that I am willing to put down my hard-earned cash to pre-order their latest book is because she always produces reading experiences for me that are engrossing, exciting and extraordinary. All of this is to say, I’m very happy to have a new Tana French novel to read and review. You’re in for a treat!

In her new book, The Searcher, French again eschews producing an entry in her Dublin Murder Squad series; instead she has written what is presumably a stand-alone mystery novel with a new protagonist in a new setting. In fact, she’s moved even further away from the series that brought her fame, fans and fortune in The Searcher than she did in The Witch Elm, which at least was set in Dublin, even though that book didn’t contain any characters from earlier novels, which had been French’s signature story element prior to its publication in 2018. The Searcher, however, is set in a tiny fictional Irish village (named Ardnakelty) and the main character is not Irish but American: Cal Hooper, an ex-Chicago P.D. detective who, following a bewildering divorce and sudden retirement, has bought a pile of land and decrepit fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere Ireland.

Just like The Witch Elm was very different from any of French’s previously published books (by not using a previously introduced secondary character as the primary character in a subsequent book) so is The Searcher different from all her previous books. One of the constitutive elements of her stories has been a view of the interplay between the police protagonist and their fellow detectives as well as between the protagonist and their profession. Plus all of French’s previous books were set in Dublin or its suburbs, with urbanized living as a feature of her characters’ lives. In French’s new book she throws out all these familiar aspects of her previous work and strikes out in a new, unfamiliar direction. It’s a brave (and rewarding) move.

The Searcher is set in a remote, rural village that has at its core a pub cum general store and one gas station and a police station with one cop. Most of the inhabitants earn their meager living from the land as farmers. Ardnakelty is the kind of place where all the kids who graduate from school are expected to leave for better opportunities elsewhere, with only the unsuccessful trapped behind, with only distant (or not so distant) relatives. Cal has moved here precisely because it is remote and sparsely populated. He was also interested in Western Ireland when he was looking for places to retire to on the Internet because the weather doesn’t get too cold or too hot. French is clearly enamored by such places, and her typically lyrical prose waxes poetic as she describes the weather, landscape and scenery.

The book starts with Cal making friends with a local tween boy named Trey Reddy who has learned that the new American neighbor is some kind of cop and wants him to find out what happened to his older brother Brendan, 19. Trey last saw his brother nearly six months ago when Brendan left their house in a hurry with a backpack and a worried expression. Cal really doesn’t want to take the case, because as a cop he is pretty sure what a 6-month-old missing persons case means (Brendan’s dead, right? Or run away to the big city to seek his fortune). He’s also unfamiliar with the terrain (literally) and because he’s new to the area, he doesn’t know where the bodies are buried or what the criminal undercurrents in the village are. Cal’s neighbor Mart has generally been his guide to acclimating to life in Ardnakelty but he is definitely not in favor of Cal sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. He doesn’t even want Cal to look into what or who is going around killing local farmer’s sheep in strange and disgusting ways. Are these cases related? As an experienced mystery reader, I was pretty sure they would be.

As others have noticed, basically, what French is doing in The Searcher is that she is writing a Western disguised as a mystery novel! Cal is the taciturn stranger new to town who is convinced to try to resolve an injustice that the townspeople have been living with for a longtime. Trey is the sympathetic local resident who convinces the outsider to act. And the current powerbrokers don’t react well to the newcomer trying to disrupt the status quo. It’s a brilliant move, and French puts a fresh twist on a familiar tale. As the plot unwinds, she slowly ratchets up the tension higher and higher, while simultaneously revealing secrets about the quiet, remote village and its inhabitants who shows themselves to be as potentially dangerous as those in Cal’s old stomping grounds on the South Side of Chicago.

Overall, I though The Searcher was very good, but not as good as French’s two previous books, The Witch Elm and The Trespasser, which I think are two of her very best. Of course, French at her very best means these are some of the best mystery novels in the entire genre and obviously no one can reach that level all the time. Even merely sublime Tana French is extremely satisfying, and The Searcher is one of the best books I read all year. (I still hope that her next book is Dublin Murder Squad mystery, or perhaps follows one of the minor characters from The Searcher or The Witch Elm!)

Title: The Searcher.
Author: Tana French.
Format: Hardcover.
Page Length: 451 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 6, 2020.
Date Read: December 27, 2020.
OVERALL GRADE: A+/A (4.16/4.0).

Wow! Tana French proves yet again why and how she is the Queen of Literary Mystery Fiction. After writing six (ok, maybe five) exquisite entries in what is now known as the Dublin Murder Squad series, French decided to release a standalone mystery The Witch Elm (or The Wych Elm) which is not even indirectly connected to her much-celebrated prior works. When I discovered in late September that Tana French had a new book coming out soon, I pre-ordered the hardcover from Amazon instantaneously. There are a handful of authors for whom I do that for (Peter F. Hamilton, James S.A. Corey, Richard K. Morgan come immediately to mind) and there are none others in the mystery fiction area (although new books by Ian Rankin, Louise Penny, Adrian McKinty and, more recently, Val McDermid are all on my must-read-as-soon-as-I-can list).

The Witch Elm  is very different from French’s other books, which are generally police procedurals set in the context of murder mysteries and generally have police detectives on the Dublin Murder Squad as the main character for whom we get first-person perspectives.

Instead, The Witch Elm has Toby Hennessy as the main character, and for an extraordinarily long period of time (well over 100 pages, possibly close to 200) there is no sign of a dead body and no sign of anyone from the Dublin Murder Squad. There goes Tana again, breaking those genre rules and upending her readers expectations!

Toby is a very odd choice for a main character of a book that ends up being an intricately plotted murder mystery, since he’s a 20-something, blonde, attractive, upper class white guy who begins the book basically bragging about how lucky he is. His charmed life is shattered by a scene that happens very early in the book, where sudden violence befalls Toby, leaving him injured and potentially permanently incapacitated (due to a vicious blow to the head).

French is deploying and deconstructing the literary device of the unreliable narrator as a central trope of the book. Toby potentially has permanent brain damage which affects his perception of events around him as well as his memory. We the reader literally can not believe what Toby perceives to hear and see. But it also becomes clear that Toby has always been oblivious to what goes on around him due to his inability to perceive the effects of marginalization on people who do not share his class and gender.

As the plot develops (and the dead body finally arrives) we are engulfed by a complicated and multifaceted network of familial relationships that involve jealousies, slights and resentments which are sourced from events in the characters’ pasts. Toby is the only child of a pair of well-to-do parents (mom is a professor and dad is a barrister) and has grown up with two other similarly situated cousins, Susanna and Leon, who are about the same age and attended the same secondary schools as Toby. They have literally known each other their entire lives and in some sense are closer than some siblings. Their parents all vacationed together and  would regularly leave the 3 kids for weeks at a time during holidays at the home of their parents unmarried brother Hugo, at a grand old house called The Ivy House. Even now, when Toby, Susanna and Leon are nearly 30 and their grand-uncle Hugo is nearly 70 the extended family (Susanna is married and has 2 kids of her own, Toby has a longtime girlfriend named Melissa) attend weekly Sunday dinner at The Ivy House, which  almost serves as another character in the book. French delights in using her command of the language to describe its coziness and provides the reader with a real sense of place. It’s during one of these Hennessy family gatherings that a human skull is discovered in the wych elm on the grounds of the Ivy House, leading to multidirectional finger pointing and eventually actual suspicion between various pairings in the trio of cousins about how much and what each of them knows or remembers about the past and the supposed suicide of a teenaged classmate 10 years before. The notion of suspecting and being an object of suspicion of the people whom you have literally grown up with animates the emotional resonance of the book.

French uses the evanescence and plasticity of memory as another trope with which to redirect the suspicions of Toby, our unreliable narrator and the reader towards various possible suspects. She also (somewhat rashly) seizes the opportunity to conduct another anthropological survey of the social lives and mores of Dublin teenagers. This was at the heart of what I think of as her worst book, The Secret Place, which revolves around the discovery of the body of a teenage boy on the grounds of a posh private girls school. Happily, I think she’s more successful and insightful at the portrayal of modern-day teenage life in The Witch Elm. I am curious as to why French wanted to return to depicting that particular milieu when there are so many others to choose from.

Typically, for me, the joy of reading a Tana French novel has been sourced in her mellifluous, oftentimes  surprisingly piquant prose as she describes conversations between characters who are usually experiencing the worst times of their lives, either during a police investigation into the death of a loved one or recalling situations that dredge up the emotions and feelings that led someone they knew to commit (and/or conceal) a murder. Happily, that Tana French is well represented in The Witch Elm. What is missing this time is the voyeuristic perspective she usually provides the reader by allowing us to see the discovery, detection and resolution of crime(s) through the eyes of a member of the Dublin Murder Squad. Surprisingly, this is a minor loss.

Another feature of a French novel is her penchant for breaking the rules of the detective mystery form she is writing in. From the unresolved issues in her brilliant debut novel In the Woods and the stunning audacity of The Likeness to her clever refusal to center multiple books on the same detective(s) in her ongoing mystery series, to the disastrous dabble with the supernatural in The Secret Place, French has blazed her own trail in the British police procedural genre. In The Witch Elm she goes even further, by centering the book around Toby, a self-centered, entitled “git” who is oblivious to his own privilege (and prejudices). French is (I think) trying to reveal and skewer the perspective of the Tobys of the world, while she simultaneously uses his lack of awareness to misdirect the reader to the central mystery at the heart of the novel. 

In the final chapter of the book, after the major reveal of “whodunnit,” she breaks the rules of the genre again (multiple times!) so successfully that I was forced to give her my top rating and applaud her daring. This is the case, even though early in my reading of the book I had harbored disappointed misgivings about The Witch Elm’s eventual place in French’s oeuvre (“uh-oh, I think this may be another misfire like The Secret Place!” to “Oh my goodness what just happened? I have to re-read that entire section!”). By the end I felt she had surpassed the cool, precise excellence of The Trespasser, which up to that point was in a statistical tie in my heart with Broken Harbor for my designation as her best book. The Witch Elm, in my opinion, is another example of French operating at the top of her game, expanding and demonstrating what a literary genre novel can and should be. Another triumph.

Title: The Witch Elm.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 509 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 9, 2018.
Date Read: December 18, 2018.

OVERALL GRADE: A+/A (4.16/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

This past weekend voters in Ireland decided to abolish laws against blasphemy by approving a  referendum to remove the word "blasphemous" from the following clause in the constitution of the republic of Ireland:

The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.

There was also a 2009 law on the books (the Defamation Act of 2009) which included blasphemy as an offense and had never been used but came to public notice in 2015 when openly gay actor Stephen Fry was investigated by the Irish police (after a complaint by an unknown  member of the public) for saying on Irish television "The god that created this universe, if it was created by a god, is quite clearly a maniac, utter maniac, totally selfish." Fry's potential legal jeopardy put the issue on the map, which eventually led to the referendum this week in which 64.85%  voted YES (43% turnout) to remove blasphemy from the Irish constitution. The government will follow with legislation to implement the will of the people to abolish the "crime" of blasphemy.

Good news!

This is an interesting graphic which shows the demographics of the non-native population of the United States has varied over time. Axios summarizes the changes over time thusly:

• For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the vast majority of immigrants came from Western and Northern Europe. The Irish fled famine, the Germans fled political instability, and Italians primarily wanted better economic opportunity.
• The 1965 act ended a program that allowed Mexicans to work on U.S. farms but remain residents of Mexico. That changed the nature of immigration from Mexico and from Central America "to primarily unauthorized," Batalova says.
• In 1986, the U.S. gave legal status to almost 3 million undocumented immigrants — an overwhelming majority of them from Mexico. These new green card holders could then sponsor additional family members.
• There has been a surge of Central American asylum seekers in the U.S. over the past several years as political chaos, poverty and violence have ravaged many of those nations.
• New laws also opened the door to immigration from Asia — initially from India and Taiwan, and later China.
• Following the Vietnam War, there was an influx of Vietnamese people and other citizens of the region who fled to the U.S. as refugees.
• Most recently, there's been a wave of immigration from African countries that began in the 1990s and 2000s for a wide variety of economic, political and humanitarian reasons.

hat/tip: Axios

Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly is the  sixth (and perhaps last?) book in the Inspector Sean Duffy series by Adrian McKinty. It is quite a corker, and probably the best in this quirky mystery thriller series set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s when "the Troubles" were at their peak. It is a good sign about the quality of these books that I had previously  said that the fifth book in the series, Rain Dogs, was clearly the best. (It was on my list of favorite books read in 2016.) The Duffy books just keep getting better and better!

The book begins with a scene where our protagonist is in such mortal peril that the reader is confronted with reality that this might be the end of the road for our favorite Catholic detective with the snobbish music tastes who has been trying to solve murders in a setting where religious factions (Catholics and Protestants) are frequently torturing and killing each other (and the forces trying to maintain order) with abandon.

However, after beginning with a literal bang, the next chapter is set in some unspecified amount of time in the past where we discover that Sean is living (in sin) with the mother of his months-old baby girl, Emma, and generally bored out of his mind with no murders to solve when a very strange one falls into his lap. (A drug dealer is shot to death with a crossbow, and it's the second time in as many days someone has been shot with such a medieval weapon.)

One feature of the Sean Duffy thrillers is that the plots get unbelievably complicated and they entangle people at highest levels of British and Irish society that one would not think that a local copper in a small suburb of Belfast (Carrickfergus) would have any chance of interacting with, let alone collaring. Another feature is the deployment of mystifying (to American ears and eyes) of Irish slang which gives the series a sense of verisimilitude and exoticism which is both appealing and off-putting (simultaneously!) The amusing titles of the books apparently come from lines from Tom Waits songs.

In Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly the fine line Duffy has been walking as a Catholic member of the occupying British police force (the Royal Ulster Constabulary) becomes untenable as many mutual enemies (such as the Catholic IRA, the Protestant paramilitaries and the British military establishment) decide the time has come to eliminate their common irritant, our "fenian" [an anti-Catholic slur] hero.

Mckinty pulled off an interesting bit of fore-shadowing by giving the reader a chance to grapple with Duffy's demise in the beginning of the novel before resolving the question of his main character's mortality in a way which is ultimately satisfying. (Yes, I am being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers.)

All of the above being said, if this is the final Duffy book I will not be sad or mad as I think McKinty has managed to bring Duffy through very many improbably survivable situations before and I have enjoyed the journey as long as it lasted. It is hard to see how McKinty could (or can) continue to sustain the increasingly high quality of the Duffy series if it were to continue. However, we will just have to wait and see!

Title: Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly
Author: Adrian McKinty.
Paperback: 322 pages.
Publisher: Seventh Street Books.
Date Published: March 7, 2017.
Date Read: April 15, 2017.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).
PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.

British atheists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry are testing Ireland's blasphemy law . Dawkins posted the following letter to the editor which has an excerpt from his best-selling book, The God Delusion:

Sir, – As a gesture of solidarity with Stephen Fry, I quote a sentence from my book, The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Every one of these adjectives is amply documented, with full biblical citations, in Dan Barker’s book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. 

I shall be giving a public lecture in the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on June 12th, and I shall therefore be available for arrest on a charge of blasphemy. – Yours, etc, 

RICHARD DAWKINS,
New College,
Oxford.

It will be interesting to see what  happens (if anything) to Fry or Dawkins as they challenge the idea that blasphemy laws should exist in a 21st century democracy.

Apparently the fine under the Irish blasphemy law is €25,000 (roughly $27,000). The text of the statute, according to the Independent, makes it illegal to use words that are:

"grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred to any religion,  thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion."

Wild!

Tana French has been one of my favorite authors since her stunning (and genre busting) debut novel In the Woods. She is one of the few authors I will purchase in hardback immediately upon release. In The Trespasser, Ms. French continues her series of murder-mysteries set in the milieu of Dublin, with a different primary protagonist in every subsequent novel. In The Secret Place (the fifth book in what is now commonly known as the Dublin Murder Squad series), Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran worked together to find out who had killed a teenaged boy in the posh private school attended by  Holly Mackey, one of their colleague's daughters. That colleague (Frank Mackey) had previously appeared in The Likeness and Faithful Place. It is this apparently haphazard recycling of seemingly minor characters from previous books into primary characters in subsequent books which sets French's Dublin Murder Squad apart from other series in the genre.

However, in the latest (and sixth) entry in the Dublin Murder Squad series, The Trespasser, French has repeated herself for the first time, by using Conway and Moran as the primary characters again. Actually, for all intents and purposes this is an Antoinette Conway mystery--she's the only character who gets a first-person narrative, although we get a lot of what Moran is thinking mediated through Conway's perceptions and interretations of his words, actions and signals. Regardless, for the second book in a row, the two work together to try and solve the mystery of who killed Aislinn Murray, a pretty young lass who was found with part of her head bashed in while wearing a sexy dress and a potentially romantic dinner for two burnt to a crisp in her well-appointed apartment after a curious anonymous tip was called into the police. Was the killer her date or a trespasser?

We had previously known from her appearance in The Secret Place  that Conway was an embittered (but excellent) detective but we didn't really know exactly how paranoid (and self-destructive) she can be until we are exposed to her neuroses full-time in the internal monologues the reader is given access to in The Trespasser. Antoinette is being subject to a hostile work environment as the only female in a squad of two dozen males, with important files disappearing from her desk, disdainful look and cheeky remarks directed her way and absolutely no acknowledgement that anything is amiss from anyone else. For the first time in the series (I think), French dabbles with the trope of the unreliable narrator. 

That being said, to me The Trespasser is French's best book of the series so far, replacing the emotionally shattering Broken Harbor at the top of the heap. This is a welcome return to the form after some of excesses and errors displayed in The Secret Place. This time the stakes are raised so high for our protagonists (either Conway solves the mystery of whodunit or she will need to resign from Murder and take a spirit-crushing but lucrative private security job, abandoning Moran to his own devices). In fact, at one critical juncture in the investigation, Conway basically decides she's going to leave Murder regardless of whether she gets a solve or not (this is just one reason I would say that she's an unreliable narrator). One of the last key scenes in the book is near the end when she finally reveals her decision about her future to her partner Stephen.

A major feature of French's novels are her depictions of police interrogations and other conversations in general. As an American reader, some of the dialogue can be impenetrable ("gaff" for home, "gaffer" for boss, "jacks" for bathroom and many, many more) but it is the running dialogue of the observations and intentions of the speakers that French includes as the investigator and the suspect duel in the interview room that animates and elevates her books above other mysteries, and this book above the others in the series. Although it is at its heart another police procedural, all of French books subvert and transcend the narrow binds of genre. What French does is make it clear that the necessary job qualifications to be a successful Murder detective, namely being able to tell whether someone is lying, always wondering whether someone is telling you the truth or trying to determine someone's motives from their body language and words are things detectives do incessantly and seemingly reflexively). It seems exhausting and absolutely inimical to healthy relationships with other human beings, and we see that play out in different ways in basically all the members of the Dublin Murder Squad that appear in the book (Conway, Moran, McCann, Roche, O'Kelly and Breslin). 

But this truth about the toll her characters pay does not lessen the reader's respect or admiration for the difficult job detectives do and the pleasure we can take from seeing them do it in The Trespasser.

Title: The Trespasser.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 456 pages.
Publisher: Viking.
Date Published: October 4, 2016.
Date Read: December 24 to 27, 2016.
GOODREADS RATING: *****.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).


PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

Tana French is one of my favorite mystery authors, having written four related but arguably stellar murder mysteries in roughly seven years (In The Woods, 2007; The Likeness, 2008; Faithful Place, 2010; Broken Harbour, 2012). Her latest book is The Secret Place (2014) and it was one of (although not the) best mystery that I read in 2014. According to the users at goodreads.com, they think her books have been uniformly declining in quality since her stunning debut, but I actually liked her 2012 book, Broken Harbour probably as much as her very first, the iconoclastic In The Woods.

One of the reasons why I liked Broken Harbour was the appearance of Francis (Frank) Mackey and the introduction of his junior partner Richie Curran. Plus, as in all of French's books, it is the other things in the books besides the central mystery which really make the reading experience so compelling for me. In the case of The Secret Place, however, these "extra" things in the story that are distinct from the central "whodunnit?" are both what make and unmake the novel in the end.

In The Secret Place the Dublin Murder Squad representatives are Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway. Moran was the sidekick character in Faithful Place (probably my least favorite of her books) while Conway is new to us. Frank Mackey becomes the first character to have an unprecedented 3rd showing in a Tana French mystery (albeit it is little more than a cameo since he mostly appears in his role as a father of one of the suspects, not as a detective). The central question this time is "Who killed Chris Harper?", a 16-year-old boy who was found dead on the grounds of an expensive all-girls school called St. Kilda's the year before the events that begin the book occur. That event, the appearance of the note "I know who killed him" as a caption to a picture of the dead boy in a semi-public confessional noteboard at the school called "the secret place" along with the report of this fact to Detective Moran by Frank's daughter Holly are how The Secret Place begins.

Moran sees Holly's visit as a chance to revive his stalled career from the cul-de-sac of the Cold Case and return him back into the advancement path of the Murder Squad by taking the new information to Conway, who as the only female detective on the team who has been unable to make any progress is solving a high-profile murder of a handsome, well-to-do minor in over a year has been experiencing her own career slowdown.

It's this kind of context of the murder investigation that French brings to her mysteries which generally give them that extra oomph, propelling them well above your average detective procedural.
In the case of The Secret Place, French raises the stakes even higher by making two significant structural decisions about the narrative: she splits it into two streams, one present day, and one a few months before the murder occurred, then advances both forward in time. The other, more controversial decision is to completely embed the reader in the lives, loves and lingo of the teenagers who are the primary actors in the drama that is unfolding. It is this second aspect of the book which makes The Secret Place feel special but also, ultimately, detracts from the book.

There are two cliques of girls at St. Kilda's, the one that the reader is intended to identify with (since we are given access to their internal monologues and Holly is a member) and the prototypical Mean Girls, who we are most definitely not intended to identify with. In addition to these two quartets of female teens there are also a group of teenage boys (from the neighboring all-boys school that the murdered Chris attended and was a leading personality). There are many, many examples of surly and incomprehensible teenage communication and behavior which after awhile as an adult one starts to winder if the anthropological novelty is worth the effort.

One does come to a point in the novel, like most excellent mysteries, where one realizes "oh my goodness, one of these characters that we have been introduced to and know pretty well at this point must be the murderer!" To me, that is almost always an exciting and thrilling rubicon, and yet in most cases it still does not provide me with enough information to suss out the criminal.

French's The Secret Place also has the advantage that in addition to wondering which of these teenagers is damaged enough to cave in the skull of another with a dull object, the reader has other interesting questions about what will happen to the other members of the clique, as well as the impact of the successful solution on the careers of the detectives involved. To me this proves that the authors has more than adequately fulfilled her duty of entertaining the reader.

I do have two quibbles with the book. The first quibble is, why call it The Secret Place when you already have a previously published novel using the word place? That just seems like somewhat lazy writing, in my opinion. (I would have gone with the title of The Secret or The Secret Spot or even I Know Who Killed Him as titles.) My second quibble is more specific, as it is directly related to content. For some reason the author decides to include actual supernatural activity into the story (i.e. behavior or phenomenon that can not be explained by scientific or logical observation). I can not stress enough how strongly opposed I am to including supernatural elements into mystery thrillers! Yes, I know I am reading fiction, but, to me, one of the aspects of teh genre is that things could have happened in the way that they are described, in order to give the readers a chance at figuring out the mysteries at the heart of the story. If there's some magical element involved then why couldn't the murderer be anyone and have used non-physical, inexplicable powers to complete their task? It's simply not a good idea to include this element. Happily, the supernatural element is not really a feature of the central mystery, it is really an embellishment of the interactions of the central characters (the teenage girls) in the book so in the end it did not dramatically deteriorate my enjoyment of the book. Your mileage may vary.

Title: The Secret Place.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 464 pages.
Publisher: Viking Adult.
Date Published: September 2, 2014.
Date Read: September 15, 2014.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).
PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.

As expected, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize marriage equality by a popular vote when the country passed a constitutional amendment by a huge margin of 62%-38% buoyed by record high turnout of over 60 of the voting population.

Freedom To Marry's Evan Wolfson said:

With a resounding vote in favor, Ireland now becomes the first country in the world to pass the freedom to marry by popular referendum, as well as the 21st nation and the 10th predominantly Catholic country in which same-sex couples can marry. Our Irish colleagues at Yes Equality ran a magnificent campaign and Freedom to Marry is proud to have shared what we’ve learned in our own campaign here in the US. The global momentum for the freedom to marry reflects and reinforces the progress we are making here in the United States – and we look now to the Supreme Court to bring our country to national resolution, following Ireland’s good example.

Ireland is now the 21st country where same-sex couples have an equal right to marry.

Eighteen countries have approved the freedom to marry for same-sex couples nationwide (Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, France, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Britain, Luxembourg, Finland and now Ireland), while two others have regional or court-directed provisions enabling same-sex couples to share in the freedom to marry (Mexico and the United States). In Slovenia, Parliament approved a marriage bill in March 2015 and is headed to the president's desk.

Woo hoo!

Ireland is poised to become the first country in the world to enact marriage equality by popular vote if a constitutional amendment is approved by voters on Friday May 22.

The text of the measure is as follows:

“Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Polls have shown a large lead for the "Yes" side which would lead to a victory for marriage equality. All major parties have endorsed the Yes position and the coalition said that they would not be surprised to see a result of 60% in support of marriage.

This is an astonishing possibility in a country that is 85% Catholic and where abortion is still illegal and divorce was legalized only two decades ago.

Good luck, Ireland!

Tana French is one of my favorite mystery writers. I discovered her books after making my way through the entire catalog of Ian Rankin's Detective Inspector John Rebus novels which are set in  and around Edinburgh, Scotland. French sets her novels in and around Dublin, Ireland. So, they are related in that they are both set in the United Kingdom.

French is somewhat notorious for her debut novel, In The Woods (2007) which violated one of the key rules of the murder mystery genre (I won't tell you which one!). Her other books, The Likeness (2008) and Faithful Place (2010), have also distinguished themselves for their horrific crime scenes, detailed and nuanced characters and shifting (although loosely linked) cast of detective protagonists. Her entire oeuvre is now commonly referred to as the Dublin Murder Squad series.

Her latest Dublin Murder Squad book is Broken Harbor and features Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, who was a minor character in Faithful Place. In Broken Harbor we are presented Scorcher as the detective on the squad with the highest solve rate who has some skeletons in his closet and has recently suffered a professional setback when he gets a high-profile horrific case dumped in his lap: a report that an entire family of four (mom,dad,son,daughter) has been found dead in a nouveau riche suburb of Dublin.

Of course all is not what it seems at first blush. The first complicating factor is that the mom (Jenny Spain) is not dead, but instead is badly beaten and clinging to life despite multiple stab wounds. The second complicating factor is that Scorcher is given a new partner to work with, Richie Curran, who also happens to be a rookie detective who has managed to pull himself out of lower class squalor by his bootstraps to a hard-fought position on the Dublin Murder Squad. The third complicating factor is that the area in which the murders took place (which is now called "Broken Harbour" but used to be known by the less lyrical name of Brianstown) is also the place where Scorcher's own mentally imbalanced mother committed suicide by walking into the sea with his now-mentally ill youngest sister Dina.

Broken Harbor is the most procedural of French's novels to date. The details and rhythms of the investigation provide the backbone of the novel, as we follow Scorcher and Richie as they  unearth how the domestic life of Pat and Jenny Spain unravelled in the weeks and months before the murders occurred. French's brilliance is demonstrated clearly in the slow reveal of the secrets buried in the past of Pat and Jenny's life together (they were high school sweethearts who bought their dream home in the suburbs and then were overwhelmed by debt and despair fueled by the economic collapse affecting the global economy and Ireland).

Some reviews have stated that they figured out who the murderer was relatively early in the book and felt that the book was longer than they felt it needed to be, but I would disagree. I was surprised by the revelation of who killed Pat Spain and his two little kids, and I was even more surprised by the other developments that occur in the book as well.

As usual with a French book, by the end of the book the reader is more highly invested in the future of the investigator than the investigation and Broken Harbor  is no different in that regard. Unfortunately, it is unlikely any of her future books will include any more information about Scorcher or Richie.

However, happily we have reporting which indicates that French will actually allow one of the main characters from one of her previous books (Frankie Mackey from Faithful Place) to return in her next book, which is called The Secret Place.

I can't wait!

Title: Broken Harbor.
Author: Tana French.
Paperback: 464 pages.
Publisher: Viking Adult.
Date: July 24, 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.75/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

Hugh Walsh (l) and Barry Dignam are Ireland's first same-sex couple to be registered after the country's registered partnership measure went into effect Monday April 4th.

 Ireland has joined other European Union countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Slovenia and the United Kingdom) in allowing same-sex couples to register their civil partnerships with the state, obtaining almost all the rights and responsibilities of married couples. The equivalent legal context in the United States to a European "civil or registered partnership" is a civil union or comprehensive domestic partnership.

The first couple to be registered is Hugh Walsh and Barry Dignam, as the Irish Times reports:

Yet today, 17 years after they started going out, they will become the public face of civil partnership in Ireland as one of the first couples to be joined under legislation which came into effect on January 1st. 

[...] 

Mr Dignam admitted that when the couple originally found out that they were to be the first gay couple who were to avail of the new regime without first seeking an exemption to do so, they did consider postponing the ceremony given the media attention that would inevitably follow. 

“We did have an opportunity to move the date but we felt that we would have been cheating [gay] people who had been through an awful lot of hardship – those who had been ridiculed and even jailed in the past,” he said. 

Although both Mr Dignam and Mr Walsh are in favour of full gay marriage rights, they hope that this too may happen in time. 

“This change is a pretty sizeable change although it is a pity it’s not full marriage,” he said, adding that there are those in the gay community who believe strongly that civil partnership does not go far enough. 

“They are right as well. Anything which is not equality is not equal,” he said, but added that he does not believe, like some, that civil partnership should be boycotted and would see himself as an incrementalist.

Congratulations to Hugh and Barry!