Sounds Of Suspense

Audiobooks Reviewed

- Dick Lochte

The Trespasser by Tana French, read by Hilda Fay Penguin Audio, 18 CDs, 20.1 hrs, unabridged, $55

Tana French is a wonder, continuing to offer, book after book, master classes in the art of creating dimensional characters and totally satisfying complex plotting. Each novel of her series, of which this is number six, presents a detailed investigation by the elite Dublin Murder Squad, focusing on a different member of the team. It’s almost the same concept that Evan Hunter, as Ed McBain, popularized in his 87th Precinct series. The exception is that French has her featured detective narrate the novel, making it not only a procedural, but an in-depth self profiling by the sleuth. In the author’s last novel, The Secret Place, the first-person narration is by team newcomer, easygoing but determined Stephen Moran, who, of necessity, is partners with the squad’s only female, an ostracized and, because of that, angry and defensive Antoinette Conway. Though the vaguely supernatural aspect of