Faithful Place by Tana French

Faithful Place by Tana French is the third installation of the Dublin Murder Squad series. This series is interesting because it doesn't actually follow the same characters around from book to book. French takes a secondary character from a previous book and makes him or her the protagonist in the next book.  That sucks if you develop a fondness for a character (there's something about Rob Ryan's character of In the Woods that sticks with me and I want to know how he's doing), but it also means you can just pick up any book in the series.

And this is a good one to pick up. You get a lot of setting here. It's Dublin, Ireland, but it turns out that there's actually more than one Dublin. There's dynamics about class, incredibly Irish details in language and place, generational squabbling, political change, domestic violence, and religion. It's an atmospheric murder mystery in which the atmosphere is the true star of the show.

I didn't much care about the mystery, to be honest. I was, if I'm honest, only about halfway correct in my assumption as to whodunit, but the mystery was solved (ahem, people who complain about In the Woods) and solved in a workmanlike manner, so that's good enough for me. I just find these books immersive, in the best sense of the word, in another world so unlike mine that it might as well be Diagon Alley. 

Another winner for French.