Joe's View

Tana French won most of the major crime writing awards for her debut novel, “In the Woods” three years ago.

The recently published, “Faithful Place,” shows that French has no intentions of resting on her laurels — it’s a superb novel about a Dublin undercover cop named Frank Mackey whose life begins to unravel when an unsolved mystery pulls the man back into his old neighborhood and the family he spurned many years earlier.

French has erased the line between crime fiction and the “literary novel” (whatever that might be) with a mystery that is grounded in character and relationships.

As the novel races to its finale, French works in elements of classic tragedy as Mackey’s determination to find out what happened to an old girlfriend 25 years ago results in another murder and more terrible revelations involving the neighborhood and his family.

Before she turned to writing, French studied to be an actress. Perhaps the work she did then on how to dig into a character and present it to an audience explains the novelist’s remarkable ability to get into the head of her male protagonist.

Mackey is a great character — a good cop whose skill is turned against him when he decides he has to find out what happened to Rosie Daly, the girl Frank wanted to run off with to England to start a new life.

When Rosie simply vanished in 1985, no one thought she was the victim of foul play, including Frank.

The neighbors knew she had dreams that couldn’t be fulfilled in Faithful Place (the ironically named Dublin locale) and Frank assumed that Rosie decided to make a new life in England without him.

When her remains are finally discovered where they were hidden — smack in the middle of Faithful Place — Frank becomes determined to find out what happened to this girl he never really got over.

“Faithful Place” is as much about family as it is about a long ago murder.

Frank is dealing with his divorce from a woman who was a class above him when they met and they share custody of a daughter the cop adores (and is determined to keep away from his own family).

French deftly takes us back to Frank’s youth without impeding the momentum of the contemporary mystery — she also takes us into the Mackey clan which has been ravaged by the alcoholism of Frank’s father and the behavior of his angry, spiteful mother.

With “Faithful Place,” this wonderful Irish writer has moved to a place near the top of the list of the best contemporary crime novelists — the book is not to be missed.