The masterful Richard & Judy pick, from the Sunday Times bestselling author.
Winner of the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book of the Year.

'A TRULY GREAT WRITER' Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

'ONE OF THE BEST CRIME WRITERS WORKING TODAY' Guardian

You can beat one killer. Beating your own squad is a whole other thing.

Being on the Dublin Murder squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed. Her working life is a stream of thankless cases and harassment. Antoinette is tough, but she's getting close to the breaking point.

The new case looks like a regular lovers' quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty and lying dead next to a table set for a romantic dinner. There's nothing unusual about her - except that Antoinette has seen her somewhere before.

And her death won't stay neat. Other detectives want her to arrest Aislinn's boyfriend, fast. There's a shadowy figure at the end of Antoinette's road. And everything they find out about Aislinn takes her further from the simple woman she seemed to be.

Antoinette knows the harassment has turned her paranoid, but she can't tell just how far gone she is. Is this the case that will make her career - or break it?

'ONE OF THE BEST THRILLER WRITERS WE HAVE' Observer

'Terrific - terrifying, amazing' STEPHEN KING
'Completely, indescribably magnificent' MARIAN KEYES

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A DISAPPEARANCE. A SMALL TOWN. A QUESTION THAT NEEDS ANSWERING...

Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a remote Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force, and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens.

But then a local kid comes looking for his help. His brother has gone missing, and no one, least of all the police, seems to care. Cal wants nothing to do with any kind of investigation, but somehow he can't make himself walk away.

Soon Cal will discover that even in the most idyllic small town, secrets lie hidden, people aren't always what they seem, and trouble can come calling at his door.

A gripping tale of breath-taking beauty and suspense that asks how we decide what's right and wrong in a world where neither is simple, and what we risk if we fail.

WINTER RICHARD AND JUDY BOOKCLUB PICK
THE SUNDAY TIMES PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR 2021
THE TIMES PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR 2021
FT BEST BOOK OF 2020
THE GUARDIAN BEST CRIME AND THRILLER BOOK OF 2020
THE TIMES THRILLER OF THE YEAR 2020

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WHAT EVERYONE IS SAYING ABOUT TANA FRENCH

'I'm a big fan of Tana French' IAN RANKIN

'I didn't want it to end' HARRIET TYCE

'An engrossing, unpredictable, beautifully written mystery' SOPHIE HANNAH

'To say Tana French is one of the great thriller writers is really too limiting. Rather she's simply this: a truly great writer' GILLIAN FLYNN

'This mystery about family, memory and the cracks in both will haunt you for a long, long time' ERIN KELLY

'Immersive and atmospheric ... Cal and Trey could very well be the new sort of heroes we need in this strange world' ARAMINTA HALL

'This is a tour de force of suspense and storytelling. Comes closer to perfection than anything I've read in the last decade' SARAH HILARY

'A tale of flawed characters, complex relationships and elusive loyalties. Subtle and powerful' CHRIS HAMMER

'The Searcher is its own kind of masterpiece' THE WASHINGTON POST

'One of the most compulsive psychological mysteries since Donna Tartt's The Secret History' THE TIMES

'The Wych Elm should cement French's place in the first rank of great literary novelists' OBSERVER

'French offers a masterclass in unreliability' SUNDAY TIMES

'A gripping read for those still pining for GONE GIRL' Elle's top five beach reads

The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago.
The caption says, 'I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM'.

Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's sixteen and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story.

Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets. The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card.

Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get it solved, he will have to work with Detective Antoinette Conway - tough, prickly, an outsider, everything Stephen doesn't want in a partner. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly and her three closest friends inhabit and disentangle the truth from their knot of secrets, even as he starts to suspect that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear.

From the multi-award-winning author of Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller In the Woods, The Secret Place is a searing novel of psychological suspense.

In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad's star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.

Scorcher's personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she's resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .

When he was twelve years old, Adam Ryan went playing in the woods with his two best friends. He never saw them again. Their bodies were never found, and Adam himself was discovered with his back pressed against an oak tree and his shoes filled with blood. He had no memory of what had happened.

Twenty years on, Rob Ryan - the child who came back - is a detective in the Dublin police force. He's changed his name. No one knows about his past. Then a little girl's body is found at the site of the old tragedy and Rob is drawn back into the mystery. Knowing that he would be thrown off the case if his past were revealed, Rob takes a fateful decision to keep quiet but hope that he might also solve the twenty-year-old mystery of the woods.