Thoroughly enjoyed Frank Mackey’s backstory, as painful as it was. French has a real talent for creating a sense of place and how it shapes people, and Faithful Place—or “Faithless Place,” as I can’t help thinking of it—is a place that Frank left, but never quite escaped. The crime at the heart of the story is one that Frank is intimately involved in and it drags him back to the old home, which his parents and siblings never left. He ends up with one foot in each of two worlds, while trying to figure out what happened to his first love, Rosie Daly. He navigates the fraught relationships of the past and tries to protect his little daughter Holly from the unhappy and unhealthy family relationships that nearly destroyed him. The characters are as vivid as the place, and the plot isn’t so tangled as to be improbable, all of which makes this a very satisfying read.