COME MEET BESTSELLING MYSTERY AUTHOR TANA FRENCH . . . WELL, AT LEAST MEET HER VIRTUALLY VIA A LIVE ONLINE CHAT ON JULY 2O AT 1:30 PM ETPenguin Books invites readers to join the celebrated mystery author, Tana French, for a chat at the Penguin Water Cooler on Tuesday, July 20th at 1:30 PM ET, hosted on the Penguin USA website! The opportunity to chat with Tana on the heels of the publication of her hotly anticipated third novel, FAITHFUL PLACE, (Viking; on-sale: July 13, 2010) is an exciting event that no thriller fan or mystery-lover will want to miss!
*“French’s emotionally searing third novel of the Dublin murder squad (after The Likeness) shows the Irish author getting better with each book.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
*“[French] revisits, evocatively and lyrically, themes she’s used before: love, loss, memory, murder, and life in modern Ireland. French’s writing remains brilliant, and her dialogue is sharp, often lacerating, and sometimes mordantly funny. Faithful Place is her best book yet.”
—Booklist (starred)
"With two novels (both New York Times bestsellers) under her belt, Tana French has certainly made a name for herself among American psychological mystery readers—not to mention readers who just enjoy a great story that’s beautifully told. Her first novel, In the Woods, won a slew of prestigious mystery prizes: the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity, and the Barry awards for Best First Novel. As with In the Woods, critics took note of The Likeness, declaring that “The Likeness [is] a book even better than the first, which was very good indeed. . . . The suspense is gut-grinding, but it may hurt more to know who did it. That’s an awful dilemma—and a wonderful book.” (New York Daily News)
Now, she’s back, this time focusing on Frank Mackey, the hard-edged, straight-shooting and fearless boss whose insane, brilliant idea for Cassie to go undercover lent The Likeness its intriguing premise. FAITHFUL PLACE takes Frank Mackey back to 1985, when he was nineteen, growing up poor in Dublin’s inner city, and in love with his neighbor on Faithful Place, Rosie Daly. Unlike so many members of the large, poor Catholic families that share their neighborhood, Frank and Rosie have bigger dreams. They hatch a plan to escape one night and depart for London, never to return to Faithful Place or the anguish of poverty and abuse of their families. Except Rosie doesn’t show up, and in her place Frank reads a letter that leads him to believe that she’s abandoned him instead. He leaves Faithful Place on his own, determined never to come home again.
Twenty-two years later, Frank, the grizzled head of his own police squad, gets a call from one of his sisters. She is frazzled and barely able to get the words out that a suitcase has been recovered behind a fireplace in the same abandoned house where Frank was supposed to meet Rosie so many years before. By the time Frank arrives at Faithful Place, the case has been identified as belonging to Rosie.
Frank is immediately sucked back into the dark tangle of relationships he left behind so long ago: alcoholism, wife-beating, the most profound emotional abuse imaginable. The cops working the case want Frank out of the way, and Frank finds himself caught between the woman he loved and the family he has spent his adult life denying."
TANA FRENCH grew up in Ireland, Italy, the United States and Malawi. She trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin and has worked mainly in theatre. Her first novel, In the Woods, was published in 2007; it won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards for Best First Novel and the IVCA Clarion Award for Best Fiction. In the Woods and her second novel, The Likeness, were both New York Times bestsellers. She lives in Dublin with her husband and daughter.
