The Trespasser
On sale
22nd September 2016
Price: £13.99
**Winner of the Crime Fiction Book of the Year Award, 2016 (BGE Irish Book Awards) **
This is the case that will make Detective Antoinette Conway’s murder squad career. Or break it.
There’s the murder squad you set your sights on, back at the beginning of your career: the one where you spend your day playing knife-edge mind-games with psychopathic geniuses, knowing that one wrong blink could mean the difference between victory and another dead body.
And there’s the one you actually work on, when you’re the squad pariah. The night shifts. The vicious jabs and the pranks that go too far. Processing scumbags and matching witness statements, sifting the dregs for the case that might get you closer to where you want to be.
Tonight’s case isn’t it. Uniforms call it in as a slam-dunk domestic. Except when Conway takes a good look at the victim’s face, she realises she’s seen her somewhere before. And suddenly the conviction that there’s a different answer takes her breath away.
This is the case she imagined. Precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous.
But you can beat one killer. Beating your own squad is a whole other thing.
This is the case that will make Detective Antoinette Conway’s murder squad career. Or break it.
There’s the murder squad you set your sights on, back at the beginning of your career: the one where you spend your day playing knife-edge mind-games with psychopathic geniuses, knowing that one wrong blink could mean the difference between victory and another dead body.
And there’s the one you actually work on, when you’re the squad pariah. The night shifts. The vicious jabs and the pranks that go too far. Processing scumbags and matching witness statements, sifting the dregs for the case that might get you closer to where you want to be.
Tonight’s case isn’t it. Uniforms call it in as a slam-dunk domestic. Except when Conway takes a good look at the victim’s face, she realises she’s seen her somewhere before. And suddenly the conviction that there’s a different answer takes her breath away.
This is the case she imagined. Precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous.
But you can beat one killer. Beating your own squad is a whole other thing.
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Reviews
French trammels the passions and drives and dark forces of the case, and renders them in vivid, surging prose: this is her gift ... [And yet] when I have only 100 pages to go it isn't nearly enough. I just want to stay in this world with these characters for as long as possible
Another gripping tale, beautifully told, by a woman at the top of her game
Story-telling at the highest level, packed with sparky dialogue and a feisty heroine who rises above her difficult background and challenging work environment in order to seek the truth
A tour de force ... [Tana French] has become required reading for anyone who appreciates tough, unflinching intelligence and ingenious plotting
Most crime fiction is diverting; French's is consuming ... [Other literary] detectives investigate crimes, but French's pursue mysteries, the kind that can never be completely solved, although we all spend a life's worth of days in the trying
A gnarly, absorbing read, and a finely tuned slice of wintry gloom from one of the best thriller writers we have
Its single voice is brilliantly sustained . . . and the book is a clever and intriguing experiment - the default technique of the psychological thriller, first-person female narration, deployed instead in a procedural whodunit
This is crime writing at its most sublime: spell-binding story-telling with a heroine to treasure in Detective Antoinette Conway ... Author Tana French's reputation has been growing steadily in recent years and she is now at her peak, as this superb novel underlines
I can do you no greater favour in life than recommending that you read [Tana French's] books
The puzzle can only be resolved by hard listening and smart questioning, setting traps through tone and vocabulary, in extended encounters that display French's virtuosity in the phrasing and pacing of inquisitorial dialogue. The Trespasser contains the most tense and serpentine interrogation scenes outside of John le Carré.
An immersive, detailed saga