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Tana French's milieu is groups of young people, families, school groups, and the like. My favorite among her Dublic police novels is Faithful Place, which is focused on an adult cop, but a substantial part of the novel is flashback to his teen years. Similarly, her acclaimed first novel, In the Woods, centers around an incident in the main character's childhood, and her second novel (less succesful, to me,), The Likeness focuses on a group of college students, which the main character infiltrates. The series is about cops, but in The Secret Place one of the main characters is a cop's daughter, and the main setting is her school. French's new, standalone novel, The Witch Elm includes both present-day interaction among a group of cousins in their 20s and the youth that they remember (or not, or misremember). There are still cops (the Guards, in Ireland), but they're not at center stage, most of the time. Instead, we're trapped in the mind and narrative voice is To...

Narration in a novel, maybe even more so in a thriller, isn't about moving the plot forward. Most plots are simple enough that a short story would be plenty of space; and most plots are so simple that keeping a reader's interest for even a few pages would be a challenge. The telling of a story is about delaying the tale more than telling it, drawing it out and postponing the conclusion, whether the outcome is a surprise or a standard resolution. Jake Needham's narrator in the Jack Shepherd novels, Mr. Shepherd himself, is a master of delay: his storytelling is a conversation with the reader, twining around the plot itself, retelling key points so we don't get lost even if we put the book down, and leading us forward inexorably toward what is to come. And, as I've observed before, Shepherd is good company all along the way. In this fifth Jack Shepherd novel, the lawyer and financial crimes expert is still living in Hong Kong, but gets pulled back toward Bangkok (the ...