It’s the detective himself (or herself, but let’s be honest, usually himself) who becomes the draw of a series. Then comes the crack mind who can alleviate our fear that some monster might get away with such hideousness and prove the world is unjust. First comes the body, often bloody and mangled or bloated and rotting, shoved under a forest embankment or wrapped up in the formerly cozy domesticity of its own bedsheets. The predictable horror of a mystery novel can be soothing. And like Ruth Rendell, Laura Lippman, Kate Atkinson, and a handful of others, she has rendered genre categories irrelevant (to the point where it isn’t always easy to find her novels in a bookshop).īut unlike even those genre-expanding novelists, French is the best mystery writer working today because she dispenses with the most alluring thing about classic detective fiction: the consistency of its point of view. Her writing leaves the undisputed King of the craft (Stephen) crowing over her “nervy, almost obsessive prose” in The New York Times Book Review. She puts out enough copy (seven novels in 12 years) to accrue followers in droves. She inspires the sort of loyalty usually pledged to mystery writers like Sue Grafton and James Patterson, whose mass-market paperbacks rest above the magazines in grocery-store aisles, span entire shelves at the local public library, and curl up with salty, dog-eared pages in beach rental houses. Imagine it: You think you’ve read every scrap put out by your beloved favorite, but then a new book appears out of thin air.Įven before reading Broken Harbor, I already knew French was the best writer working in the genre. The oversight turned out to be a monumental blessing. Yet somehow I’d missed Broken Harbor (2012), the fourth in the popular detective series. With each installment in her Dublin Murder Squad books - The Likeness in 2008, Faithful Place in 2010, The Secret Place in 2014, The Trespasser in 2016, and her first stand-alone, The Witch Elm, in 2018 - I’d hopscotched down the path of her rain-splattered, unsettling, unabashedly Irish mysteries.

I’d read her novels with near-religious devotion ever since her 2007 debut, which I’d spotted at the Barnes & Noble by my parents’ suburban Philadelphia home and swallowed down in one long gulp.

I hound Viking’s publicity department so diligently for publication dates and galley copies that one member of the team, upon meeting me at a party, looked a bit unnerved and said, “Oh, you’re the Tana French nut.” I thought I was a Tana French completist until I sat down to write this essay.

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