Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

My first non Murder Squad Tana French, and I still liked it

The Searcher by Tana French

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In 2020, I was super excited to read a Tana French book I found in my (virtual) bookshelf that I thought I had not yet read.  To my disappointment, it was just one of her (in my opinion) lesser novels, that now, a mere one year later, I have forgotten the ending to again.  This time, I made sure that this wasn’t a repeat.  EIther way, I’m sure that this would have been a memorable book because it is the most different from all other […]

…but the past ain’t through with you.

Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad #4) by Tana French

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Broken Harbor, by Tana French, is not a book. It is a jagged ball of glass that dazzles the eyes but draws blood as deftly as a razor blade. Detectives Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, lead investigator of the Dublin Murder Squad, and his rookie partner Richie Curran are assigned a high profile murder case. A family of four, including two young children, have been brutally attacked in their home in the housing estate of Brianstown. Swift justice is called for and Kennedy’s close rate is the […]

The Broken Dreams of Broken Harbor

Broken Harbor by Tana French

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I’ve read Tana French’s books out-of-order, starting with what is probably my favorite: The Trespasser (2016). Broken Harbor (2013), though, might take second place for its creepy depiction of a family haunted by forces both internal and external…. Find the rest of my review at my blog here.

Remind me that once I was free, once I was cool, once I was me

The Secret Place by Tana French

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This year I decided to go back to some of the series I started but never finished and give them one more try. Series: Dublin Murder Squad. I last read this series in 2013. What I remember about the series prior to this book: I remember being disappointed that the protagonists of In the Woods and The Likeness were absent from the following books. I remember disliking the loose ends in In the Woods and thinking that the setup for The Likeness was beyond ludicrous. […]

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]

When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something.

The Searcher by Tana French

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Like The Witch-Elm, this book feels like Tana French is taking the (very successful but still present) formula of the Dublin Murder Squad books and twisting and playing with it, and the results with both this novel and the previous one, is a more subtle and literary effort. If Witch-Elm is what the Murder Squad books are like from a suspect’s point of view, this book moves out from the first-person perspective to a very close third person, and the effect of this change is […]



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