Faithful Place

Faithful Place is a crime novel by the American-Irish writer Tana French, published in 2010. It is set in Dublin and features the undercover detective Frank Mackey, a supporting character from her previous novel The Likeness.

In December 1985, Frank Mackey was nineteen and planning to run away to London with his girlfriend Rosie Daly to get out of the poverty and recession of the Ireland they were living in, and away from her father, who violently disapproved of the relationship. They were to meet at midnight at the top of the Faithful Place cul-de-sac in the Liberties, the working-class Dublin neighbourhood where they both lived. Rosie did not come. Frank searched the abandoned tenement house at 16 Faithful Place, found a note from Rosie apologising for leaving without him, and left it where it was and went on his own. Neither of them came back to the street. Twenty-two years later he is a detective in the Dublin Undercover squad, and the discovery of Rosie's suitcase behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place brings him back to the family and the neighbourhood he walked out of.

The book is the third of French's loosely connected Dublin Murder Squad novels, each of which follows a case tied to the past of the officer working it.