Am currently reading Faithful Place by Tana French. It's another murder mystery, set in The Liberties in Dublin. I'm quite enjoying it, despite the problem I've had with this and the previous book The Likeness, which is that Dublin is fundamentally too small for the events to really occur. In The Likeness, we are asked to suspend our disbelief that there could be two identical women, unrelated, wandering around Dublin for years, and no one ever twigs, allowing the protagonist, an undercover cop, to assume the identity of a woman who looks exactly like her.
It's not going to happen. Dublin is a small city, where if you don't know someone, it's a fair call to say that you know of them, or you know someone that knows them. Six degrees of separation isn't in it, it's more like two, maybe three degrees at best. Put it this way, the very first day, of my very first job in Ireland, I discover that Himself had been to school, same year etc, as the boyfriend of the woman I sat next to. That's the kind of place Ireland is. So the basic premise of The Likeness, or that of Faithful Place, in which the protagonist cuts ties with his family and never sees them, despite living maybe a mile away, on the same side of the Liffey, doesn't really wash. They would have been more successful had they been set in a larger, more disparate city, such as London, or Sydney.
But they're still well written, with an ear for dialogue, and so very much better than the psychopath-serial killer-murdering-young-blonde-professional-women that seems to be the hallmark of so much American crime fiction recently!
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