Despite their trauma-filled childhoods, Frank, Rob, and Mick hold on to the belief that the country was safer when they were kids.
It’s perhaps no surprise that there’s a sense of deep nostalgia for preboom days among French’s detectives as they contemplate Ireland’s uncertain future. It’s a point of pride among the detectives that they work every day in “eight hundred years’ worth of the buildings that have defended this city, in one way or another.” French chooses Dublin Castle as the headquarters for her Dublin Murder Squad. It’s a handy gimmick, sure, but it’s also created a structure that’s allowed French to explore, in increasingly nuanced ways, the city she calls home.īut history is a comforting weight as well as an oppressive one. Each successive novel has centered on a detective introduced in a previous novel. Warshawski series-but French’s series explores Dublin with remarkable scope and dexterity. Seeing a city unfold over time through the eyes of a detective is, of course, one of the great pleasures of crime fiction-think of Los Angeles in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series or Chicago in Sara Paretsky’s V.I. The Secret Place is the latest installment in French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, a masterful set of five detective novels that constructs a deeply observed portrait of modern Dublin. But their longing for what that storybook view represents-home, family, belonging-fuels a dense tangle of friendships and rivalries that the novel’s protagonist, Detective Stephen Moran, has to unravel to solve the mystery of a murdered teen boy. Kilda’s, a private school in a leafy Dublin suburb. The city seems far away to these girls, whose lives are largely confined to the grounds of St.
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