The Trespasser

My preordered copy came in the day before Rosh Hashanah. On the second day, after services were over (my synagogue runs short and under-populated on the second day), the house quiet without electricity and my toddler at daycare, the idea of just reading a little was unbelievably tempting, albeit borderline sacrilegious. And of course, once I started, Tana French's writing was addictive.

I remember very little of the “central” mystery. What I remember about is the creeping, burning embarrassment of self-recognition reading about how Antoinette Conway nearly let a mystery go unsolved because she was so caught up in how others saw her. Many mystery novels have the “stupid plot” error, where an idiot could solve the mystery if they simply followed the obvious clues, and so the writers have to make the brilliant detective look over the one clear next step to prevent the novel from early closure. In this case, there's no inconsistency: French's novel is literally about the narrative that Conway tells about herself of being an isolated loner. The mystery is window-dressing for the consequences of letting yourself be seduced into such a narrative, and the hard climb back out.

So in the end, it was pretty apropos of the holiday – I'm definitely guilty of perpetuating negative self-narratives, and choosing to fail rather than challenge them. And I felt inspired by French to try to do better this year.