Faithful Place, by Tana French

It’s not that Frank Mackey can’t go home again. It’s that he doesn’t want to. He left the family residence on Dublin’s Faithful Place 22 years ago. He was suppose to run away to England with his sweetheart, Rosie Daily, but she never showed up and seemed to have gone to England without him. Heartbroken, Frank left anyway to escape his abusive Da and suffocating family. Now he’s an undercover cop with the Dublin Guard, (police) with an ex-wife that he still cares for and a daughter he adores.

One morning his younger sister, Jackie, the one family member with whom he stays in touch, calls to tell him that Rosie’s suitcase has been found in an abandoned house just up the street. Frank knows that Rosie would not have left all those years ago without her suitcase, so back he goes to Faithful Place to reexamine her disappearance.

Things haven’t changed much. Da, although sick, is still abusive as he calls his three sons “little whoremasters, all of yous.” Ma, as always, has the sharpest mouth in town – “You’ll have to settle down sooner or later. You can’t be happy forever.” And Frank’s two brothers and two sisters are trying to make the best of lives still, in many ways, centered on these two. Before the mystery of Rosie is solved, this family will do grave damage to one another.

Dennis Lehane’s excellent novel, Mystic River, used a crime as the moving force to propel a story about family, friends and neighbors. Like that book, Faithful Place is a novel involving a crime rather than a crime novel. It is very much an Irish Mystic River, not quite as good, but not far behind.

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In The Garden Of Beasts, by Eric Larson

This is the fascinating story about William E. Dodd, FDR’s first ambassador to Germany, and his family, especially his daughter Martha, who was such a free spirit that she seems to have screwed half the men in Germany (and one or two from the Soviet Union). It was was easily the best non-fiction book I read this past year. Dodd, a conservative man, in the good sense of the word, was a little slow in recognizing the Beasts, but became an idealistic opponent when he did come around. This made him an enemy of the “pretty good club,” the career State Department diplomats who were both naïve and self-serving and who poisoned his efforts whenever they could. And they very often could.

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The Art Of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. Much like Faithful Place and crime, this is not a baseball novel but one in which baseball serves as the connecting theme bringing together several people at a small mid-western college. There is a similarity here to Richard Russo, but Harbach tells his own tale and does it beautifully.

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The Sense Of An Ending, by Julian Barnes. “Ending” won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for outstanding novel by a citizen of The Commonwealth of Nations. This is a short novel of mistaken memory and missed opportunity. The mother of his college girlfriend has bequeathed Tony Webster, who has lived a cautious 60+ years, a small sum of money. Wondering why this woman, who he only met once, would leave him anything, Tony investigates and discovers that the real past and the one of memory are often very different.

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The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankell. This last of the Kurt Wallander series, is a terrific read.  It is rich in interest and filled with touches of sadness for the aging hero as he edges towards retirement and the Alzheimer’s that Mankell tells us in the epilogue, is his destiny. The Troubled Man made me think and feel when I read it five months ago. It still does today. As that old song goes, "who could ask for anything more?"