A Halloween Treat

Finished Tana French's latest, Faithful Place, last night.  I would have taken longer with it, honestly, and tried to savor it instead of devouring it, but I'm just one of the people who signed up to reserve it long before the book even made it to the library, so I had to return it by next Monday (so, for me, today).  Not that devouring it was hard - as with her last two books, the plot pulled me in, the pacing pulled me along, and the characters and dialogue were pitch-perfect and burrowed easily under my skin.

Also like the last (second) book, Faithful Place took a character from its predecessor as the main character: Cassie Maddox, the partner of the protagonist of In the Woods became the conflicted heroine of The Likeness, and now her "boss" in that book, Frank Mackey, is the very conflicted and very flawed star of Faithful Place. 

It's an interesting way of handling the books; they're not a series, per se, each story stands along, and stands steadily & strongly.  But if you can't - or can't if you're me, anyhow - read one and not read the others...but that is definitely more the writing than the story's.  Which is a great thing as far as evaluating the author's skill!  The second was more tied to the first, but this one, at least, is wholly self-contained.  It's funny because I read In the Woods, and was almost disappointed that the main character was being "abandoned" and replaced in the next book.  But then I read the next book, and fell in love.  And then, of course, was a little sad that she wouldn't be coming back in the third, and was sceptical of how invested I would get in Mackey's story.  And, OF COURSE, French sucked me right in...and I was not at all surprised.

As far as the story, it wasn't all that much of a "mystery," in so far as I suspected the identity of the murderer from wicked early, and a lot of the plot twists were fairly predictable, but I think the book, and the experience of reading it, is watching how the story unfolds, and how the characters navigate those twists.  I was still on the edge of my seat, so to speak, even if I wasn't shocked by anything.

On a total side note, Lauren Willig was at the Borders in Downtown Crossing yesterday, and I went and listened to her read from her latest Pink Carnation book - well, an off-shoot of the series, and got a signed copy of The Mischief of the Mistletow: A Pink Carnation Christmas, which apparently gets some Jane Austen into the mix.  I was wondering when that would happen...  Not going to read it for a while, since I am on my "only scary and/or bloody" books until Halloween kick, but should be fun.