The Trespasser

Antoinette Conway, who played a supporting role in French's previous Dublin Murder Squad novel, The Secret Place, moves into the limelight here. She and that book's protagonist, Stephen Moran, are partnered and working well together, but they're consistently assigned the worst cases, and she's having trouble with the rest of the squad (crucial pages somehow go missing from her reports or her cell phone is dropped in coffee when she steps away from her desk), and she's considering taking a friend's offer of a cushy job traveling the world guarding Saudi princesses. When Conway realizes she'd previously met the victim of an apparently straightforward domestic murder, the case zigs and zags in unexpected and dangerous directions with local gangs, possibly corrupt cops, and a mild-mannered bookstore owner all playing a part. French's interconnected first-person novels easily stand alone, but consuming them in order gives readers the pleasure of seeing characters they've come to know through others' eyes.