Much of the story is about the crazy stew in Frank’s life of poverty and a dysfunctional family and a lack of hope and Rosie: Rosie with her bright copper hair and dazzling smile erased all the ugly parts of Frank’s life. I’ve been talking to my husband about Frank and his brothers like I’ve known them all my life, and I feel that I have!įrank loved Rosy something fierce, and allows he would have died for her, “back in the day.” He admits, “I had spent my whole adult life growing around a scar shaped like Rosie Daly’s absence.” There are enough simmering passions in this story to set off a volcano, and the raw sorrow that sits like open sores on the characters don’t heal in your own heart once you’ve closed the book. The range and depth of the portrayals are remarkable. As Frank knew, and even his ex-wife knew, “all the time I was married to Olivia and pretending to belong in Dalkey, I was waiting for Rosie Daly to walk through every door.”ĭiscussion: The characters of this book are superbly rendered, and in such thick and colorful Dublin dialect you may need an online dictionary of Irish slang to find out what everyone is saying. But if Frank is ever to let go of Rosie in his mind and his heart, he has to know what transpired twenty-two years before. And some murders that are discovered after Frank reappears put him under suspicion as well. Frank cannot avoid making that painful trip back to his childhood home and back to the past in order to find out what happened.įrank’s not much welcome at first to the crowded and hard-up tenants of his street – Faithful Place, cops are anathema. Now his sister Jackie has called him and told him that some renovators of an abandoned tenement on his old street found Rosy’s suitcase, complete with the ferry tickets to England and her birth certificate. Frank never really got over it, and he never went back home. Twenty-two years before, at age 19, he was all set to run off to England with the love of his life, the beautiful Rosie Daly, but Rosie didn’t show up.

So I put off reading this one, and then was floored to discover almost from the outset that I totally loved it! I even dithered around at the end, so I wouldn’t finish it too fast!įrancis (“Frank”) Mackey is a 41-year old divorced undercover detective in Dublin with partial custody he shares with his ex-wife Olivia of precocious nine-year-old Holly.

Even though I loved French’s other two books, I knew that the main protagonist in this story is a character I hadn’t especially been taken with in his brief appearances in the first two books. I was fully expecting not to be enamored of this book.

Faithful place