I’m so in love with Tana French’s murder squad series that I temporarily convinced myself that I liked mysteries (keep a lookout for my Not In My Wheelhouse pick, which is almost certainly going to be one of two remaindered books I bought because I wanted more Tana French and have run out of her writing to read). I don’t know that I do, I just really like good writing, and French is amazing. So yeah, my “I Love This” isn’t the genre or the subject, it’s the author.
She does an amazing job of not only creating standout characters, but also understanding them inside and out. Antoinette Conway makes a different kind of impression from her own perspective than in the murder squad book written from her partner’s, but she’s still uniquely her. You understand why she’s acting like a jerk to said partner, even when the reader can see her reasoning is unsound. You get why she looks down on the woman whose death she is investigating, while (at least for me) identifying more with the overly emotional murder victim than the all-business Conway.
The plotting is excellent, as always, and French pulls of the neat trick of making the answer both surprising and predictable, as all good twists are. I don’t want to give too much more away, as (per my first paragraph) French has only written so many books. I’m hard pressed to take away any of the joy of reading them away. Go read this. Go read all of them. And then tell me what else I can read to scratch the Tana French itch.