Tana French: Dublin Murder Squad Reading Order and Where to Start

Tana French has won the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award. Her Dublin Murder Squad series is one of the most formally interesting crime series published this century. Before you start, there’s one thing worth knowing: it doesn’t work the way most series do.

How the Dublin Murder Squad works

Each book in the series follows a different detective from the Dublin Murder Squad. A character who is the protagonist of one book might appear as a secondary character in the next, and disappear from the series entirely after that. The books are linked by setting, the squad itself, and an atmosphere — but not by following the same detective book to book.

This is unusual. It means:

• You can technically start anywhere in the series and understand what’s happening
• But reading in order is still recommended, because later books contain significant spoilers for earlier ones
• The emotional effect of seeing a protagonist you loved become a supporting character in someone else’s story is deliberate and powerful

Read in publication order.

The Dublin Murder Squad reading order

In the Woods (2007) — Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl at an archaeological site in the Dublin suburbs. Rob has a history with the woods that he cannot fully access. French’s debut; still one of the best books in the series.

The Likeness (2008) — Cassie Maddox goes undercover as a dead woman who shared her face. Set in a communal house outside Dublin. Many readers consider this the best in the series.

Faithful Place (2010) — Frank Mackey, an undercover detective, returns to his working-class Dublin neighbourhood when the woman who left him standing at the altar twenty years ago turns out never to have left at all. French’s most personal-feeling novel.

Broken Harbour (2012) — Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy investigates a family murdered in a half-built estate outside Dublin, a ghost town from the Celtic Tiger crash. The sharpest exploration of Irish economic trauma in the series.

The Secret Place (2014) — A cold case reopens at a Dublin girls’ boarding school. Frank Mackey’s daughter Holly is involved. The teenage world inside the school is rendered with uncomfortable accuracy.

The Trespasser (2016) — Antoinette Conway, the Dublin Murder Squad’s most isolated detective, investigates what looks like a simple domestic murder. The series ends on the same squad but with a hard, exhausted clarity.

Full Dublin Murder Squad reading order →

Tana French’s standalone novels

After The Trespasser, French wrote two standalone novels set in rural Ireland that are not part of the Dublin Murder Squad:

The Wych Elm (2018) — A man recovering from a violent assault discovers a skull in the hollow of a wych elm tree in his family’s garden. A slow, claustrophobic psychological thriller, very different in tone from the squad books.

The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2024) form a loose duology. Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago cop who moves to the west of Ireland and finds that rural Ireland has its own dark undercurrents. More quiet, more rural, more interested in the landscape than in plot mechanics. They share a character and a setting.

Where to start

Start with In the Woods. It is the longest and most emotionally demanding entry point, but it establishes everything: the atmosphere, French’s prose style, the way the investigation is as much about the detective’s interior life as about the crime itself.

If In the Woods doesn’t hold you by the middle, try The Likeness — it is a more immediately propulsive read. But most readers find the opening of In the Woods impossible to put down.