But if you have a more, shall we say, chaotic energy, just pick the one that piques your interest most and dive in. Publication order is easiest, because chronologically, the six Dublin Murder Squad books come first, followed by her two standalones.
I’ll preface my official ranking by telling you that there’s really no wrong reading order for these books. But given that all things are, in fact, relative, some of them have to be better than others, and so I’m here to offer you the definitive Tana French ranking. Even the worst of her output is worth your time, and every one of her eight novels has transcendent moments. The fact of the matter is that Tana French has never written a bad book.
There’s also the series storytelling mechanic French uses in the Dublin Murder Squad novels, brilliant in its simplicity, where the protagonist of every novel was a supporting character in a previous one, which keeps the series from stagnating. (Presciently, French stopped making professional detectives her central characters in 2018, just as white people were broadly catching on that in real life, the police were not the heroes.) But beyond mysteries and motives, you’re likely to encounter protagonists grappling with personal trauma and thorny ethical questions, a three-dimensional supporting cast, a tremendously powerful sense of place (see the house in The Likeness, the grove in The Secret Place, the wild Irish landscape in The Searcher), and luminously descriptive writing. These are, in the narrowest sense, detective novels: six entries in the Dublin Murder Squad series, focusing on investigators in the eponymous (purely fictional) police unit, and two standalone novels that are also about unsolved deaths.
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