"Faithful Place" by Tana French

"Breakfast was the full whammy: eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes. This was clearly some kind of statement, but I couldn’t work out whether it was See, we’re doing just grand without you, or I’m still slaving my fingers to the bone for you even though you don’t deserve it, or possibly We’ll be even when this lot gives you a heart attack. " -- Faithful Place, (p. 45). 

Undercover agent Francis Makey,  narrator of Faithful Place, is served this typical Irish breakfast on his first visit in 22 years to the extremely dysfunctional home of his parents and siblings. Obviously, he feels enormous pressure from them, and struggles not to be overwhelmed by the guilt they would like him to feel. His adult life includes a divorce, a fraught custody arrangement, and his success as a member of the police force ... but he can't completely turn his back on his origins.

Faithful Place, Tana French's 2010 detective novel, clearly offers much more than the obsessed search for a murderer.  It's the story of Makey's early life in the impoverished neighborhood in Dublin (a neighborhood called Faithful Place), of his hatred of his father, and of his efforts to get more and more information about who he is. Because the murder victims are both very close to Mackey, he's not officially involved in the police work, and in fact is constantly told to back off and let his colleagues do their job. He can't let it go: understanding what happened consume him until the quite dramatic ending where all is revealed.

Like many writers of fast-paced and suspenseful detective stories, Tana French often punctuates the flow of time with meals: especially breakfast. Indicating a new morning is always a way to make the reader feel the daily rhythm of the unfolding mystery -- as well as a way to create local atmosphere. Here's the narrator's version of breakfast the next morning:

"The streets were shining wet and empty, bells ringing for early Mass and nobody much paying attention. I found a depressing café full of depressed Eastern Europeans and got myself a nutritious breakfast: soggy muffins, a handful of aspirin and a bucket of coffee." (p. 147).

I enjoyed Faithful Place enormously, and admired the way it combined a self-portrait of the narrator with a well-crafted murder mystery. It's full of humor and word play, as well as zingers about the social condition of the narrator and the people around him. I enjoyed it especially because it reminded me of a couple of visits I've paid to Ireland; I really appreciated the list from the family's guilt-inducing breakfast: "eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes." This was the exact menu in a Dublin bed & breakfast where I once stayed! And just as I was writing the review, my friend Sheila in England sent me the following parody of the classic breakfast:

Coincidently, here is Sheila's photo of "A Fool English Breakfast" which was in fact a dessert in a restaurant.
She explained: "The mushrooms were meringue, the bacon dried watermelon with a fat rim of some sort of jelly,
the black pudding was blueberry rice pudding and the egg made up of mango sorbet and panna cotta."