The Trespasser

“Her life was so boring, just thinking about it make me want to hit myself in the face with a hammer for a bit of excitement.”

Despite her junior status, Antoinette Conway is an ass-kicker on the Dublin Murder Squad. With the amount of abuse she receives from her male colleagues as the sole woman on the squad, she has to be. But at this point she is also constantly on edge, even around her partner Steve, the only person she trusts, and ready to quit the force. But first she has to finish the case that arrived on her desk at the end of a night chef––if for no other reason than to show her misogynistic “colleagues” that she can.

The case seems simple enough: an anonymous tip came in that a woman named Aislynn Murray is dead, killed in her home in what seems to have been a domestic dispute. Aislynn is dressed for a date and the man she was seeing admits to having been at her home at almost exactly the time of her death. Even more, the young man, a local bookshop owner named Rory, appears to have been spending a suspicious amount of time on her street.

Everything points to Rory, so Breslin, a senior detective who volunteered to babysit the two rookies, is pushing for Conway to arrest him and close the case. But Rory doesn’t seem like the type and the facts don’t quite line up. Aislynn underwent a radical transformation in recent years without an adequate explanation, her best friend is withholding information and seems scared, and the apartment is wiped down of all prints.

Out of sheer determination and spite, Conway decides that she is going to see this case through to the end.

Like with Broken Harbor, another of French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, the central case in The Trespasser is competently drawn. These are not grand conspiracies, but intimate crimes that present the detectives with numerous obstacles to overcome, both of which give French ample time to savor the minute details of the process. What sets French’s novels apart, though, is that each book contains a second plot that plumbs the psychological depth of one detective, while leaving the other members in the squad, some of whom repeat from novel to novel, in the background.

Here the fundamental conflict is over sexism on the Murder Squad and how much longer Conway is willing tolerate micro- and macro-aggressions in an environment where it feels like everyone is set against her. Compared to most other detective fiction both of these novels feel like a revelation, but this is the more successful of the two because the two conflicts are intimately connected. Rather than the case sparking the psychological drama, as in Broken Harbor, here the psychological feeds into the professional and vice-versa.

I came to French’s novels through a discussion from the NY Times Book Review podcast where one of the reviewers casually mentioned that French has a lot of devout followers. At this point, consider me a convert. Her stories are neither monumental nor exceptional at invoking setting, but they are brilliant intimate portraits of a single case and the people who solve them.

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My next book is Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age, a military history about the spread of gun technology. He seeks to answer how Europe came to dominate the world with this innovation that the Chinese developed nearly a half millennium earlier.