Series · mystery
Dublin Murder Squad
The Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French has 6 books and is best read in publication order, starting with In the Woods (2007).
- Books
- 6 books
- First published
- 2007
- Status
- completed
- Last checked
Start here: In the Woods (2007) — then read straight through in publication order.
Reading order
The order the books were released — the default way to read the series.
- Book 1:
In the Woods
Alternative text for cover: Cover of In the Woods - Book 2:
The Likeness
Alternative text for cover: Cover of The Likeness - Book 3:
Faithful Place
Alternative text for cover: Cover of Faithful Place - Book 4:
Broken Harbour
Alternative text for cover: Cover of Broken Harbour - Book 5:
The Secret Place
Alternative text for cover: Cover of The Secret Place - Book 6:
The Trespasser
Alternative text for cover: Cover of The Trespasser
About the Dublin Murder Squad series
Tana French reinvented the police-procedural series with a simple, radical structure: the Dublin Murder Squad books share a world but not a hero. Each novel is narrated by a different detective — usually someone glimpsed at the edge of the previous book — and each narrator gets one case that cracks their life open. In In the Woods (2007, winner of the Edgar for best first novel), Rob Ryan investigates a child's murder in the same wood where his own childhood friends vanished. His partner Cassie Maddox takes over for The Likeness, going undercover as a dead woman who was living under Cassie's old alias. Frank Mackey, the manipulative undercover boss, narrates Faithful Place; ambitious by-the-book Scorcher Kennedy gets the ghost-estate horror of Broken Harbour; cold, watchful Stephen Moran works a boarding-school murder in The Secret Place; and abrasive Antoinette Conway, the squad's only woman, closes the series with The Trespasser.
French writes crime as psychological excavation: her mysteries resolve, mostly, but the real subject is the narrator's self-deception, and she is one of the few writers in the genre willing to leave certain wounds unexplained. Add prose of genuinely literary voltage and a decade-spanning portrait of boom-and-bust Ireland, and you get the series that made "literary crime" a shelf of its own. Complete at six books, it remains the standard against which character-driven detective fiction is measured.
How to read this series
Publication order is best, but this series is unusually forgiving. Because every book has a different narrator and a self-contained case, each novel truly stands alone — many readers enter through The Likeness or Broken Harbour with no harm done. What publication order buys you is the pleasure of recognition: each narrator first appears as a side character in an earlier book (Cassie in In the Woods, Frank in The Likeness, Stephen and Conway in Faithful Place and The Secret Place), and events of In the Woods echo through The Likeness.
Two honest warnings. In the Woods famously declines to answer one of its central mysteries — knowing that going in prevents the most common reader frustration in the series. And note the US/UK title difference: Broken Harbour = Broken Harbor. The series is complete at six; French's later standalones (The Witch Elm, The Searcher, The Hunter) are separate.
Frequently asked questions
How many Dublin Murder Squad books are there?
Six: In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbour, The Secret Place and The Trespasser. The series concluded in 2016.
What order should I read the Dublin Murder Squad books in?
Publication order, starting with In the Woods — each narrator debuts as a side character in an earlier book. But every novel stands alone, so out-of-order reading works better here than in most series.
Do the Dublin Murder Squad books have the same main character?
No — that's the series' signature. Each book is narrated by a different Murder Squad detective, usually someone met briefly in a previous installment.
Does In the Woods answer its central mystery?
Only one of them. The murder case is solved; the narrator's childhood disappearance famously is not, and no later book resolves it.
Will there be more Dublin Murder Squad books?
Tana French has moved on to standalones and the Cal Hooper novels, and has not announced a seventh squad book; the series is considered complete.
Reading order last verified .