Our Quiet Growing Time

Twenty-two years ago Detective Frank Mackey's heart was broken on the night that he thought he was going to run off to England with his childhood sweetheart. But Rosie never showed. Instead, she left a 'Dear John' letter for him and disappeared out of his life forever. Frank never went back to his home on Faithful Place, unwilling to face his dysfunctional family without Rosie just a few houses away. Now Rosie's suitcase has been found in a derelict house on Faithful Place and 41-year-old Frank is on the trail to discover what happened, finally, to the love of his youthful life. His trail leads him back to Faithful Place, the street so filled with memories and demons that he hoped he'd never have to return.  Faithful Place shows Tana French at her best, back in the groove after the somewhat disappointing The Likeness . Frank was introduced in The Likeness as Cassie's boss from Undercover. He is a renegade. His moral code as a cop is pretty skewed; he...

There's a dead girl in an abandoned cottage in a tiny Irish village. That's certainly run-of-the-mill for the murder detectives on Dublin's Murder Squad. But the catch this time is that the dead girl is a dead-ringer for former Murder Detective Cassie Maddox. And it gets stickier: the victim's name is Lexie Madison, an alias that Cassie herself created, years before, when she served as an Undercover Agent. There are no real suspects, but Cassie has a unique opportunity in this case: pretend that Lexie didn't die and slip on her shoes once more. Donning Lexie's identity, Cassie goes undercover into the Whitethorn House, the home where Lexie lived with four friends--four very unusual friends--in the hopes that she can ferret out the suspect from the inside.  The Likeness is French's follow-up to In the Woods , which was a darling of critics and readers alike, and highly enjoyed by this reader. Cassie was Rob Ryan's partner on the Murder Squad fro...

Rob Ryan has finally attained his dream job as detective on the Dublin Murder Squad. He's got the wardrobe, the loyal partner, and the sarcastic attitude that all say that he's made it... until the day that he and his partner, Cassie Maddox, randomly get assigned to a case that may destroy the life that Rob has created. It's the rape/murder case of Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old girl found in the Dublin suburb of Knocknaree. Twenty years previous, there was another criminal case in that same neighborhood, in that same wood. Twenty years ago, three children went into the wood to play, as per their usual routine. Two--Peter and Jamie--were never seen again, and the third child, Adam Robert Ryan, was found clinging to a tree in terror, unable to remember what had happened to his friends. The case had been closed for years, no leads were found, Adam became Rob, moved away and grew up, and no one but his trusted partner knows the secret trauma of his past. Will Katy's murder ...

I am unequal to the task of summarizing over 9,000 pages of conflict into a concise paragraph to set up where The Scottish Prisoner fits in the whole of Gabaldon's massive canon of delicious tomes.  Let's just say: 1) read the Outlander series; and 2) the events in this latest Gabaldon take place during a gap in Voyager, and is in itself a continuation of Lord John Grey's story. This book has the exquisite double-whammy of featuring both Lord John and our favorite Highland warrior, the strapping Jamie Fraser (the Scottish prisoner of the title), who currently is serving his sentence as a traitor to the Crown as a groom at the estate of friends of Lord John. The last we saw Lord John and Jamie together (in the sequence in which this story fits) was in an uncomfortable scene in a stable in which an angry declaration of desire was made, a punch was thrown, a well-formed nose narrowly avoided smashing, and readers blushed in libraries and living rooms across the w...

James Bond is the man who comes to mind when you think about British spies. He's handsome and cocky. He's swaggering and dangerous and his prowess with the ladies is much-vaunted. I'd like to introduce you to another British agent... Granted he's short, chubby, and middle-aged, bespectacled and prone to muttering to himself. He's the kind of man who remembers his umbrella on clear days and leaves it at home on days when it's bound to pour. He's married to a young beauty--but she's as faithless as his umbrella, and he doesn't have the guts to leave her. This is George Smiley and the fate of British intelligence lies in his pudgy hands.  ...Because it's the height of the Cold War and there is a Soviet mole inside the British intelligence agency. Smiley is pulled from recent retirement to investigate and with a small but trusted team, he follows paper trails and conducts interviews to determine the identity of the double agent. I had a ro...