The Trespasser by Tana French review – a smart, twisty crime novel

The interrogation scenes in the Dublin Murder Squad could rival those of John le Carré

The trend for long-running crime fiction series means that the half-dozen novels that Tana French has written over the past decade are sometimes catalogued as “Dublin Murder Squad Books 1-6”. But, although the works are sequential, the connections between them are unusually tangential for the genre. This has become a key part of French’s distinctive brilliance.

Eschewing a franchise protagonist, French grants the controlling perspective to a different detective each time. Frank Mackey, the main cop in the third book, Faithful Place, is a background character in the fifth title, the echoingly named The Secret Place; and, in another example of this reprise technique, Frank’s daughter, Holly, a nine-year-old witness in the earlier book, has become a 16-year-old suspect by the later one.

It’s a badge of French’s talent that the two books featuring the Mackeys can be read with enjoyment separately or non-chronologically, but regular readers gain an extra level from the backstories, as, crucially, do the fictional figures, who become layered with memories, secrets and sensitivities in the way that real people are.

In the closest that French has got to a conventional followup, The Trespasser allows a second successive case to Detectives Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran, who investigated the killing of a teenage boy within the grounds of an exclusive girls’ private school in The Secret Place, the book that gold-plated French’s reputation in both the UK and US.

Typically, though, the novelist now hands the narrative from Moran to Conway, so that the partnership is viewed through a fresh lens. Conway is unusual among her murder squad colleagues in being both a woman and non-white, emphasising an outsider status already made likely by her loner persona and explosive temper. The perspective change is sometimes startling; the story told by Moran made sensitively little of Conway’s race, but she understandably says much more about it herself.

The partners are sent, apparently on the cab-rank principle of next detectives due a job, to a flat where Aislinn Murray, a young receptionist, has been found dead, her head smashed against a stone fireplace. A burnt dinner in the oven and table laid for two lead to the initial assumption that the killing results from a lovers’ row or, in the sick-slick cop lingo that fizzes through the books, “boy-beats-girl”. Rory Fallon, a bashful bookshop owner who was surprised to be admitted to Aislinn’s affections, becomes prime suspect, assumed to have thumped her after being dumped.

The view that it must be Rory is most volubly put by a squad veteran, egotistical smoothie Detective Breslin, who impresses on the lead duo the virtues of a “quick solve”. But, this early on in a long novel, readers know that the solution can’t be that simple, and French knows that we know … She satisfyingly complicates the situation with the victim’s involvement in a previous police invesigation, and questions about whether Conway and Moran were allotted the case for reasons other than roster logic.

French’s novels each adopt a particular sub-theme and technical challenge. The Secret Place used an unusual narrative rhythm – chapters set on a single day alternating with sections flashing back over a year – to explore the allegiances and deceits of adolescent friendship. In The Trespasser, the subplot topic, extending scenarios that French rehearsed in the Mackey books, is father-daughter relationships. Both Conway and the victim have absent dads, and their respective attitudes to this gap in their lives take on gathering significance. The narrative’s final surprise involves a startling quasi-paternal intervention from a member of the cast who has seemed far from daddyish.

The compositional challenge the novelist has set herself on this occasion is that, in contrast to the multi-suspect configuration of The Secret Place, there is just one name in the frame for most of the pages, with no forensic evidence and only circumstantial witness testimony.

This means that Conway and Moran have to talk the solution out of the suspect and any connections they can muster. “All these stories,” Conway laments late in the day, but, just a few pages later, a further interrogation has added “another story.”

The puzzle can only be resolved by hard listening and smart questioning, setting traps through tone and vocabulary, in extended encounters that display French’s virtuosity in the the phrasing and pacing of inquisitorial dialogue. The Trespasser contains the most tense and serpentine interrogation scenes outside of John le Carré.

Between the thrilling and twisty verbal exchanges, the novel is also a triumph of voice. Shards of jargon – a detective is a “D”, a victim a “vic” and random killings “randos” – glint from sentences with a Chandleresque quality of poetic-depressive. Conway marks one interviewee as “Poet meets Pervert – floppy shirts and a dandruffy mac”, and entering rooms in Murder HQ, sketches them as “stinking of night shift and stale Spar danishes”

As the reader hopes, the eventual explanation lies very far from the failed date-night championed by Breslin, finally incorporating complex psychosexuality and dangerous personal and professional calculations. The Trespasser shows French to be a one-off phenomenon. Her only problem now is whether the intoxicating creation of Antoinette Conway challenges her to abandon her policy of cop rotation next time round.

• The Trespasser is published by Hodder & Stoughton. To order a copy for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Contributor

Mark Lawson

The GuardianTramp

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