Tana French is a very interesting writer. She doesn't have many works, but each of them has achieved considerable success and is impressive.The debut novel "In the Woods" has a keen, delicate and elegant narrative technique, combined with a precise grasp of the characters' psychology, which amazed the publishing houses in the UK and Ireland, and immediately snatched up the copyright at a high price of six figures.After publication, it won unanimous praise from critics all over the world. It not only won the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, McVitie Award, Barry Award and other awards, but also appeared in "New York Times", "Publishers Weekly", "USA Today" ", "San Francisco Chronicle", "Los Angeles Times", "Denver Post", "Boston Globe", BookSense, and the North Carolina Independent Booksellers Association and other nine best-selling books in the United States, and was selected as the "Editor's Choice of the Year" by Amazon Web Bookstore Book".Its sequel "The Likeliness" (translated as "Mysterious Incarnation" in the Taiwan version) also immediately entered the Amazon bestseller list that year and became the annual editor's choice.And this third book (faithful place) once again set off a best-selling whirlwind, and continued to sweep the bestseller lists in the United States, and was once again listed as the annual book selection by Amazon's editors.

An Irish writer who writes about things in a small country (small town) in Ireland, it is interesting that her books are so popular in the United States. French novels have the following characteristics 1. The characters in each book are related.The secondary characters in this book are likely to be the protagonists of the next one.For example, Casey in "Mysterious Incarnation" is the actor's partner in "Mysterious Forest"; Franco in "Mysterious Incarnation" is actually Casey's former boss in "Mysterious Incarnation", a character who only appears in a few places.Readers who know this are very curious about Frankie's next book: who will be the protagonist in this fourth book? (They all searched for it, and it is said that the most optimistic about the little policeman.)

2. Describe the emotional entanglements of ordinary people, especially involving the relationship between family members.In French novels, there are no serial killers, perverts, pedophiles, drugs, promiscuity, incest, or horror. Son... There are no very "American" roles and factors such as prostitutes, drug dealers, CIA, such and such experts, etc., and there is no complicated historical, cultural, and political background.The origin of the story may be that an ordinary young man, or child, died, and then the investigation began.Compared with other suspense detective novels that are attractive with the puzzle-style structure of "who killed the man", Frankie's novels are more about the protagonist's character changes, psychological entanglements, and The turmoil in the lives of investigators, victims, and investigators caused by the incident.All the characters are nothing special, they are not public figures, they are ordinary people like you and me in life, including the police detective who is the protagonist, who is often passionate but reckless, has a past that he does not want to mention, and has a relationship with his boss. Relationships are not so good, there are colleagues who make enemies, marriage or love is not going well.However, through the investigation of the incident, everyone involved in this incident has more or less experienced emotional and mental turmoil. ——The dead are just dead, and the survivors can better understand the meaning of "alive" through experiencing the death of others.At the end, often "who is the murderer" is not so important anymore, readers have long since withdrawn from the interest of guessing and deciphering, but follow the characters in the book to breathe together, share sorrow and joy, and lament the desolation of the world.

3. Small town style and real characters.In Frankie's novels, the stories all take place in the corners of the city.For these people living on the edge, Dublin is already a metropolis, and London is even more of an international metropolis. It is a place where they feel bright and open since they were young and want to escape.The story always starts from now, through the memories of the protagonist, going back to the childhood light and shadow of the 1970s and 1980s.At that time, Ireland was quiet, slow, and even poor. The secular people in the city worked hard for their own daily necessities, communicated, yelled, laughed, quarreled, scolded children, beat their wives, had reunions, were guests, and gossiped behind closed doors... Like ordinary people living anywhere in any country on earth.The flashes and shadows and noises of thirty years ago float into the memory of the protagonist, other people's memories, and our memories and sighs either turbulently or gently.Because French has received professional actor training and outstanding talent, once she writes a certain role, she can immediately feel a sense of substitution and enter the situation.When we read her novels, it is almost like watching a sensual Hong Kong drama, watching the love and hatred of small people, watching the vicissitudes of life in a place in the past thirty years.This cordial sense of identity is the same for readers from any country.

4. The "misfortune" of ordinary people.How unfortunate does it have to be to be called "unlucky"?Do the dead count?Does it have to be a catastrophe?In addition to the dead, there are so many small sorrows and resentments in our lives, like you hiding aside and crying because of a complaint from me, like me running out of the house because of an inexplicable slap from my father and not coming back all day, It’s like my mother standing in the kitchen hard all afternoon, but no one came to eat a table of dishes. It’s like we excitedly agreed to leave home together and start a new life in a foreign country, but you never came… These bits and pieces Unfortunately, it is hard to talk about it, and we can’t talk about it. When things happen, we are angry, excited, and aggrieved, but the past is the past, just smile lightly and stop mentioning it.And life is like this, many cries are low, many shouts are silent, many ups and downs and transformations are lonely.What is the misfortune of a person or a family in the long river of time?How much weight can a day and a period of grief take in such a big word as "life"?But who said we don't care!In Frankie's novels, this kind of ordinary sadness is overflowing and spreading. We are finally relieved to feel that ordinary people's sadness is also cared about and can be written. It turns out that what we have experienced, others have also experienced. Pass!And when we have read the story's ups and downs, breathing and blinding our eyes, we can look at life more openly.

5. The language is sharp and interesting.This "interesting" definitely does not mean "funny", but is close to the characters and has individual characteristics.After all, Frankie has studied acting and even worked as an actor, so he knows what "dialogue" is.Her characters have an indescribable sharpness and seriousness in their speech, which makes people look beautiful or feel lost.For example, the nagging, bad-tempered and kind-hearted mother of the protagonist in the movie, what she said is so unpleasant but so true-how many mothers we meet in life, "curse" the children in the same way" scolded "big ah.

Back to the novel itself.The story is tangled: nineteen-year-old Franco and Rosie, each other's family scarred, broken, unhappy.They couldn't go on living in such a noisy and barren place (land of loyalty), so they agreed to leave together and go to England to work hard for their own new life.However, on the appointed night, Rosie did not come.Franco waited obsessively until the sky turned light gray, and finally had to go on the road alone in disappointment.There was no news of Rosie after that, and Franco always thought that she had changed her mind temporarily, and decided to leave him and go out to fight by himself.Franco later became an undercover police detective in the Dublin SWAT team, and his life was full of ups and downs in a life-and-death relationship.For twenty-two years, he has been secretly looking for Rosie's whereabouts, looking through various criminal records, eager to find her name.He imagined her struggling or wandering, happy or unrepentant, beautiful or haggard. He imagined that one day he could meet her again, let her see his rebirth, and take revenge on her.Rosie's youthful and graceful figure has become a phantom-like existence, haunting his heart all the time.Until a phone call from his younger sister Jieqi told him that in the old house on the 16th where he and Rosie met, he found Rosie’s suitcase, and there were two expired ferry tickets (to England) in the box, And a series of materials such as identification.Franco stumbled and almost returned home quickly, trying to get rid of all the obstructions of his peers to find out, but finally found Rosie's body! ——It turns out that she never betrayed him!So, who did such a cruel thing, who did such a beautiful and wonderful Rosie offend, and wanted to end her nineteen-year-old young and beautiful life?And shortly after Rosie's body was found, Franco's younger brother Kevin fell to his death in the old house at No. 16. What's going on?Is there a connection between Kevin's death and Rosie's?

Franco, who vowed never to return home, had to linger in the place of loyalty for a long time.He didn't have any physical evidence, and he couldn't find it. He could only piece together and reproduce the situation when the case happened, based on his impressions of everyone here and his relationship with them, constantly searching and talking.A lot of annoyance, hustle and bustle, resentment, unwillingness, and jealousy have all been tossed out, and many past events from the past and earlier years suddenly surfaced and intertwined with each other.The pain of growing up, the disillusionment of youth, the helplessness or calmness in the face of life in the market, wandering alone and hunting endlessly.

The revelation of the truth made people astonished and lamented at the same time, and it also broke Franco's heart.At this time, facing his family, old friends, and his beloved daughter, what will he do?I think that when the author Frank writes here, he must be obsessed with a work by a writer, that is, You Can't Go Home by Thomas Wolfe.This "home" represents not only the place where a person grows up, but also the place where he comes from, but also represents a person's past and past events. We can only say, what do you want to escape from? solve.Only by breaking free from the shackles of the past can we continue our future life more proudly.

"The past is never dead, it's even not past." (The past is never dead, it's even not past.——William Faulkner), in fact, it describes the entanglement of leaving home and returning home, showing Man's war against the "past".Every character in the story wants to find and realize "new life" hard, and wants to escape from the past, but is always found by the past.Tana French portrays the most painful relationship between a person and his family with her delicacy and profundity, which is exactly one of the most unspeakable relationships between people and their surroundings.It's hard to tell whether Franco hates, fears, attaches to, or something else about the home he grew up in.It's hard to tell if he's coming back to find Rosie, or to find something he's always suspected and longed for.The emotional interaction between him and his family is tangled, painful and long-lasting; his relationship with his old neighbors and hometown is awkward, hasty and calm that he has not discovered.During these lingering days, his nostalgia for Rosie seemed so gentle and bleak, and his interpretation also adjusted the tragic tone of the whole book.The suspenseful case and the heavy mood exude a melancholic beauty in Frankie's writing.Just like the title of this book "Mysterious Echo", irresistible events leave an eternal imprint on people's lives and hearts; no matter how deliberately concealed or forgotten the past, it still echoes from the distant heart in the end.

The last thing to mention is that although Frankie’s novels all use the police detective as the protagonist, they did not deliberately emphasize the identity of the police detective and the matter of "the detective handles the case", but regarded the police detective as an ordinary person. , writing about its most everyday and softest side.Franco is not a tough guy, nor is he an iron-blooded police detective. The nineteen-year-old melancholy boy always overlaps with him now, but his image is clearer than that of the middle-aged senior police detective.No matter how time changes, how the city evolves, and how the world changes, in the quietest corner of Franco's heart, he will always stay in the warm lights of the cold winter when he was nineteen years old, holding Rosie's hand and saying to go together, always good , grow old together. This is the obsession of young people.It is such a novel looking at youth from afar.Go back, find the past, find your first love, and find your home.