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A review by alba_marie
La Maison des absents by François Thibaux, Tana French
5.0
Interestingly enough, I ended up reading this book in French (my second language) after living in Ireland 1 year. Perhaps because I read it in a second language - and therefore had to take more time to read it than I normally would spend on a thriller - I quite enjoyed it. It wasn't perfect - it was a bit slow moving at times, and they spent an awful lot of time interviewing the same people multiple times. I didn't find the detective (Kennedy) or his backstory with his crazy sister etc terribly interesting, and would have wanted more time spent on secondary characters like Richie and some of the people related to the murders.
For me, the most interesting aspect of the book was the setting - a family living in a remote, half finished ghost estate along the sea in Ireland. Of course, I had heard tell of these ghost estates before but I hadn't really given them or the people who live there a second thought.
A ghost estate is a housing development that was started during Ireland's Celtic tiger economic boom pre 2008-10, usually in a random, rural place no one really wanted to live, sold for ridiculous prices off a housing plan to people desperate for a dream home - as well as to landlords who bought houses to rent them crazy high rents - and then the crash came, and they were never finished, left empty, skeletal, desolate. (Caveat, I did a bit of research after reading the book and most of the estates have now been demolished or finished, with only a few remaining. Though google maps hasn't updated yet, so you can see what they once looked like!)
Imagine living in a half finished estate, far away from everyone, everything. Imagine you bought your house on a crazy high mortgage because someone sold you a dream, the perfect place to raise your family, in a lovely rural housing estate - expensive, but still probably the only house you could afford. And then the crash happened, your estate was left half finished, full of skeleton houses. You lost your job and no one was hiring so you couldn't find a new one. Suddenly you were stuck in this remote, forlorn place 24 hours a day, in a house that is falling apart because it was put together too quickly, a house that used to be worth upwards of €160,000 and now has fallen to €40,000 or €50,000. You can't sell it, you can't leave it unattended for fear of break-ins, vagrants and trouble makers hang out in the empty houses down the quiet street that doesn't even have a sidewalk or street lights so you can't let the kids play out on their own, and even if you weren't so remote, you can't even afford to go out, travel, visit friends. Wouldn't that be enough to drive anyone crazy?
For me, the most interesting aspect of the book was the setting - a family living in a remote, half finished ghost estate along the sea in Ireland. Of course, I had heard tell of these ghost estates before but I hadn't really given them or the people who live there a second thought.
A ghost estate is a housing development that was started during Ireland's Celtic tiger economic boom pre 2008-10, usually in a random, rural place no one really wanted to live, sold for ridiculous prices off a housing plan to people desperate for a dream home - as well as to landlords who bought houses to rent them crazy high rents - and then the crash came, and they were never finished, left empty, skeletal, desolate. (Caveat, I did a bit of research after reading the book and most of the estates have now been demolished or finished, with only a few remaining. Though google maps hasn't updated yet, so you can see what they once looked like!)
Imagine living in a half finished estate, far away from everyone, everything. Imagine you bought your house on a crazy high mortgage because someone sold you a dream, the perfect place to raise your family, in a lovely rural housing estate - expensive, but still probably the only house you could afford. And then the crash happened, your estate was left half finished, full of skeleton houses. You lost your job and no one was hiring so you couldn't find a new one. Suddenly you were stuck in this remote, forlorn place 24 hours a day, in a house that is falling apart because it was put together too quickly, a house that used to be worth upwards of €160,000 and now has fallen to €40,000 or €50,000. You can't sell it, you can't leave it unattended for fear of break-ins, vagrants and trouble makers hang out in the empty houses down the quiet street that doesn't even have a sidewalk or street lights so you can't let the kids play out on their own, and even if you weren't so remote, you can't even afford to go out, travel, visit friends. Wouldn't that be enough to drive anyone crazy?