I finished reading Tana French's 'The Trespasser' first thing this morning. I actually set it aside late last night, because I was getting so stressed out about it I knew I'd have trouble sleeping. Here's a review that tracks pretty well with my impressions of this outstanding crime drama.
Review by Alison Flood, The Guardian
There’s more than a little of the noir about
Tana French’s latest,
The Trespasser.
Set, like her previous thrillers, among the detectives of Dublin’s
murder squad, perhaps it (hard-)boils down to the fact that her
protagonist this time, detective Antoinette Conway, manages to fizz with
contempt for the world around her, bristle with toughness and sink
regularly into poetic gloom all at the same time.
“The case comes in, or anyway it comes in to us, on a frozen dawn in
the kind of closed-down January that makes you think the sun’s never
going to drag itself back above the horizon,” says Conway, the only
female detective on the Dublin squad, dealing with the cruel practical
jokes of colleagues who want to see the back of her, and lumbered with
straightforward domestic violence cases when she wants to be on the
trail of psychotic serial killers.
This particular case looks like a lovers’ tiff, “just like the
uniforms figured... some gobshite who got his knickers in a twist and
threw a tantrum at his girlfriend”. Aislinn Murray is lying dead in her
immaculate home, blond and beautiful. Everyone is convinced the
boyfriend did it, but Conway and her partner Stephen Moran – both
appeared in French’s previous novel,
The Secret Place – believe there’s more to it.
Or perhaps, tired of being given the easy solves, they just want this
to be more than another “slam-dunk” case. Keeping it quiet from the
rest of the team, they pursue a series of dark possibilities, in the
process discovering there was more to the glossy Murray than met the eye
(“everything about her seems dense enough with sadness to drop you like
a sandbag”).
Conway is an enjoyably complex companion, both bruisingly
misanthropic – “If he’s not our guy, he’s such a godawful damp weenie,
the kind who needs regular slaps across the back of the head just to
keep him from vanishing up his own hole” – and so in love with her job
it almost makes you want to give it a try. “That pulse is hammering right through me, practically lifting me off
the bench. Forget coffee; this job, when it’s right, this job is the
hit that speed freaks throw their lives away hunting ... It’s a smell of
blood raging at the back of your nose, it’s your arm muscle throbbing
to let go the bowstring, it’s drums speeding in your ears and a victory
roar building at the bottom of your gut.
French also pulls it out of the bag here with some of the best back
and forth interrogation scenes out there. “No ifs and maybes twitching
in the corners, gumming up the air, itching inside my clothes... Just me
and the guy across from me, and what we both know he did. It lies on
the table between us, a solid thing with the taut, dark shine of a
meteorite, for the winner to claim.”
As she and Moran edge closer and closer to a dangerous truth,
obstacles continue to fall or be planted in their paths, until they’re
not sure they even want to get to the bottom of what they’re looking
for.
While
The Trespasser isn’t quite up to the intense brilliance of
The Secret Place, it is still a gnarly, absorbing read, and a finely tuned slice of wintry gloom from one of the best thriller writers we have.
Read
more about Tana French here.
