First Thoughts: The Trespasser

FROM the beginning of her career, when the ambiguous ending to her debut In the Woods (2007) had more than a few readers crying foul, Tana French has refused to stick rigidly to the crime fiction genre’s conventions.

Where most successful authors of police procedurals tend to write about a single series protagonist, for example, the bestselling and awardwinning French has passed on the baton from book to book.

Detective Stephen Moran narrated French’s previous novel, The Secret Place (2014); in The Trespasser, Conway relates the story, which begins when Conway and Moran are called to the scene of a ‘domestic’, where they discover that a young woman, Aislinn Murray, has died after a violent assault in her Stoneybatter home.