Things have all taken longer this week than I've anticipated. Stuff I had planned to do Wednesday and Thursday has now piled up today, Friday. And I had planned on doing different (and time consuming) stuff over the weekend. I have to put together two rom com pitches, and I don't watch rom coms. Even more than not watching, I feel like I maybe don't get rom coms. Like certain ways women are assumed to be wired, for me, are hooked up all backwards. My friend was recounting a time where a handsome guy showed up outside her dorm with flowers and threw rocks at her window. The other girls on her hall woke her up in wonder. She said that it was nice getting the flowers, but it was even nicer having the other women see her get those flowers. By contrast, I am horrified by romantic gestures. They make me want to run and hide. They embarrass me. I don't like people looking at me, in the first place, and looking at me for that reason feels even worse.
Anyways, what I'm saying is that I worry my instincts are off for the genre. But I've got a chance to pitch rom coms, so I should pitch some rom coms.
Blog time!
**SPOILERS**
French, Tana – FAITHFUL PLACE
Published: 2010
Read: 4/2021
Faithful Place is the third book in the Dublin Murder Squad series. This time the protagonist, and first-person narrator, is Detective Frank Mackey. He’s an Undercover detective who hasn’t been home or contacted his family in 22 years. He reconnects with his family, living in the neighborhood of Faithful Place, when a suitcase is found from the night Frank left. He and his girlfriend had planned on running away together to England, but on the night in question, she never showed and Frank figured he got dumped. It shaped his whole mindset over the course of the rest of his life. But, he finds out, she was murdered. Her body was under a slab in the basement. As he’s digging (facts, I mean), Detective “Scorcher” Kennedy on the Murder Squad takes over the case. The two men don’t get along and Scorcher wants Frank out of his hair. (I’m doing a poor job on this summary.) Anyways! Frank’s family is a mess and then Frank’s younger brother gets killed, and in the end Frank finds out it was his older brother who killed both. When Frank hauls his older brother in, all of Faithful Place turns their back on him, feeling he should have just killed his brother instead of turning him over to the police.
This was the shortest and least-deeply conceived book I’ve read by French so far. It was still an interesting and good read though. It had this quote I liked: “I've always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you're over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he's not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he's into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”
The events in the book were objectively dark, but they didn’t feel as dark as stuff in her other books. And it wasn’t as scary either. Basically, nothing can beat the blood-soaked shoes from In The Woods. Oh! This is not particular to this book, but I forgot to say it before. The pleasure of a lot of detective novels (and crime shows like CSI), is how the detectives put things back together. They take a crime – and uncertainty – and sew it neatly back up, making everything right again. In French’s novels, the detectives and the investigations do the opposite. They take an already broken situation and rip it into shreds. They uncover far more that shouldn’t be said, seen, or felt. In the end, the case is almost the worst for having been solved.
Rating: ★★★
No comments:
Post a Comment