Faithful Place

There is a new Tana French novel, and it is good.  I'll try to keep what I know about it under wraps until it's release in July, but here's part of the email I wrote to her publisher rep after reading it:        The most astonishing thing to me is Tana french in  general.  Three books in, and she's batting 1.000.  That just doesn't  happen.  Joe Hill over at Harper's at about .800, David Mitchell and  Adrian McKinty are at about .750, and even guys running phenomenal  series - John Burdett, Stiegg Larssen, god rest him, Martin Cruz Smith - average out at about .650, .700.  Your own David Benioff kind of  shot himself in the foot with Wen the Nines Roll Over, and by being a  kind of crummy screenwriter (yes, it still counts).  I can completely  understand an author only having one great book in them (one of the  reasons I'm terrified for Nick Harkaway's sophmore effort), and two is a deeply lucky coincidence, but you don't get three five star, knocked-out-of-the-park-with-the-bases-loaded home runs from one author, and you certainly don't get them all in one go.  It just doesn't happen.  The last author I was this excited about their continuing work was Jonathan Lethem after Motherless Brooklyn, and let's face it: a couple of the sci-fi novels between Gun With Occassional Music and Motherless were middling, at best.  (Also, Lethem's writing swan-dived into a septic tank with Fortress of Solitude, failing miserably at exactly the sort of time-and-place evocation that Ms French succeeds   beautifully with).       Even forgetting the whole 'in a row' thing, who has three all-star, perfect novels that's still breathing?  I don't mean good, I mean truly phenomonal, best-book-of-the-year perfect?  Some would argue Ian McEwan, maybe Michael Chabon, or pick your nearly-dead American literary lion breathlessly chronicling the fairly boring travails of the baby boomers.  And all of them have grade-a stinkers, as well.  Walter Mosley's probably got three, but he's also got his 'sexistential' novel; Stephen King may actually have four or five, but the man's a freak of nature (said lovingly) who's penned something along the lines of fifty novels - that's one great novel out of every ten, with more than his share of outright failures as well.  Nobody does three perfect in a row.  Hell, Murakami's basically been rewriting the same three books his entire career, working towards a perfection he hit once, maybe twice.  Three in a row, with not a dud on either side, just doesn't happen.  My fairly long-winded point being, if three doesn't, four really, really doesn't.  But at this point, I'm not sure she can write anything mediocre.   -so, yeah.  I'ts good.