![]() ![]() Among her peers, she’s admired by Marlon James, Stephen King and Gillian Flynn, who has called French’s work “absolutely mesmerizing.” Her novels are often less about solving crimes than examining the aftermath of trauma and the unreliable nature of memory, as well as the social systems and entrenched class disparities that can give rise to violence. “She takes the classic elements of those story structures, but she’s not buying into any of it.”įrench has been called both “our best living mystery writer” and “a mystery writer for people who don’t read mysteries.” Her work has been compared to writers as varied as Thomas Hardy, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy and Donna Tartt. ![]() ![]() “With novels in this genre, there’s this desire for breakneck pace and a big twist at the end, and she never felt any pressure to do any of that,” the novelist Megan Abbott said of French. French’s books have sold around seven million copies worldwide - close to four million copies in the United States alone - and are published in 37 languages.īut French has always defied easy categorization and flouted mystery genre conventions, even seemingly inviolable ones, like solving the actual mystery. Veering into western themes might seem strange for a writer who has built a fan base with her gritty and psychologically acute Dublin suspense novels. French started wondering what would happen if she applied some of that to an Irish village and came up with a classic hero in Cal - a lone stranger who comes to town and disrupts its social fabric, exposing secrets and tangling with local vigilantes. ![]()
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