Deborama’s Books — Some More Books I’ve Read Lately — Part 1

Tana French’s oeuvre to date. The Dublin Murder Squad books (1 through 6) and the last two are standalone novels. I don’t know if they’re in the order written. I did not read them in this order.

Everything by Tana French. (4.5 stars average)

It’s been a while since I have been moved to read the entire oeuvre of a writer. With only eight books so far to her name, and such a readable style, full of great characters in a great setting, Tana French is an author for whom that’s relatively easy to do.

Apart from reading the first book first, almost by accident, I did not read these order, as shown in the picture. The longest gap was between the first one and the second one (still in order at that point) of more than a year. And in that gap, I saw a “mini-series” type TV dramatization of the first two, squished together as if one story.

There is an unusual overlapping structure to the first four books of the Dublin Murder Squad series, where you are subtly encouraged to sympathize with a main (or point of view) character and be suspicious of a secondary character, only to find that in the next book, the secondary character has become the main one. Here are very brief synopses of the six Dublin Murder Squad books so you can see how they interconnect:

In the Woods — Detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, best friends outside of work, catch a case of a missing child in what, unbeknownst to all except Rob, is Rob’s childhood village, where he was the victim of a…