Tana French is on another level, and her readers know it. The Dublin Murder Squad books (In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbour, The Secret Place, The Trespasser) rotate detectives across six volumes, and the gimmick is that each book’s lead is a peripheral character from the previous book. So you’re already half in love with Cassie Maddox before you crack the spine on The Likeness, because you watched her work the case in In the Woods. That’s not a thriller move. That’s a literary-fiction move applied to detective fiction, and it’s why French fans are RABID about her. (I’m one of them. I’ll fight you about this list in the comments.)
Table of Contents
What hooks you is the detective’s whole life, not the case. She’s making coffee badly. Lying to her therapist. Avoiding her mom’s calls. Pretending the partner she doesn’t trust isn’t onto her. The murder investigation is happening underneath all of that, and at some point a hundred pages in you realize you stopped paying attention to it AS plot because the detective IS the plot. That’s the slow burn. That’s the “live in the case” effect.
She was sixteen when nobody believed her. Now she’s the detective.
The Storm Reaper is a literary Fire Island thriller where the island keeps its secrets the same way the storms do. Detective Violet Crisp has spent a decade reading the hurricanes for what nobody else will see. A new body. A new chief who finally listens. Read the prologue and first six chapters free.
★★★★★
“The storm aspect of the story and the way Violet’s character was written to be very knowledgeable in regard to barrier islands, storms and the overall impact of such storms on a barrier island added a layer to the story that had me hooked from the first chapter.”
— Robyn Reads, Goodreads Reviewer
Read the First 6 Chapters Free →The short version
- If what you miss is the place as much as the detective, The Storm Reaper (Kristen Van Nest) is the one here where the island has one ferry and the cop grew up reading its storms.
- If what you miss most is the Dublin Murder Squad’s outsider-inside-the-squad tension, read The Cold Cold Ground (Adrian McKinty). Belfast, 1981, same architecture.
- If you want French’s psychology with the whodunit removed, read The Secret History (Donna Tartt), the book Tana French has called one of the most suspenseful murder mysteries she’s ever read.
- If you want the American writer who taught a generation to do this, read Mystic River (Dennis Lehane).
How I picked these 8 books like Tana French
Three criteria.
First: Tana French is slow on PURPOSE, and so is every book here. Every page of close-third interior monologue is doing structural work, the detective’s whole life unfolding alongside the case until by chapter 12 you can’t separate them.
Second: I need to believe the detective has a mother who calls. Tana French writes Cassie Maddox, Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran as people first, detectives second. So do McKinty, Mina, Griffiths, Cleeves, Lehane, Tartt and Phillips. (That’s also the male-gaze test, if the woman could be lifted out of the book and dropped into a different genre as a real person, the writing’s good. If she only exists in relation to who’s looking at her, the writing’s not.)
Third: the setting has to know something the detective doesn’t. French’s Dublin suburbs are doing class commentary; her west-of-Ireland village is doing rural-Catholic-community commentary; her Iron Age archaeological site in In the Woods is doing literal-buried-secrets commentary. Books on this list earn the same: every setting is loaded with what the detective is missing about the case.
I read French and wrote my own atmospheric island procedural alongside her shelf. Here’s what made the cut.
How do these 8 compare at a glance?
| Book | Why it’s like Tana French | Setting | Pace | How the reveal works | Series? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. The Storm Reaper, Kristen Van Nest (2026) | The closest match on this list for a detective who can’t separate the case from the place she grew up in | Fire Island, NY, one ferry in and out | Slow burn with a hurricane clock | Trust no one; a decade of silence breaks | 1st Violet Crisp novel |
| 2. The Cold Cold Ground, Adrian McKinty (2012) | A Catholic detective in a Protestant police force: the outsider-inside-the-squad engine, with the Troubles doing the setting’s work | Belfast, 1981 | Slow burn | Procedural, the killer is hunted | Book 1, Sean Duffy |
| 3. Garnethill, Denise Mina (1998) | A woman nobody believes runs the investigation herself, a decade before French did it | Glasgow tenements | Slow burn | Character-led, through the mental-health system | 1 of 3 |
| 4. The Crossing Places, Elly Griffiths (2009) | The Iron Age dig from In the Woods, turned into a whole series | Norfolk salt marsh | Medium | Procedural, two timelines of buried bones | 1 of 15, Ruth Galloway |
| 5. Raven Black, Ann Cleeves (2006) | Broken Harbour’s “the town already decided who did it” on an island | Shetland, midwinter | Slow burn | Whodunit against the village’s verdict | 1 of 8, Shetland |
| 6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001) | In the Woods’s childhood wound, carried into the adult case | Boston neighborhood | Medium | Tragic; the past is the second case | Standalone |
| 7. The Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992) | The Likeness’s closed circle of friends, with the murder told on page one | Vermont college | Slow burn | Inverted: you know who, the book is why | Standalone |
| 8. Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips (2019) | The Murder Squad’s rotating-narrator trick, compressed into one book | Kamchatka Peninsula | Slow burn | Twelve women, one answer by the last chapter | Standalone |
Which authors like Tana French come closest to the Dublin Murder Squad?
Authors like Tana French come up as Gillian Flynn and Ruth Ware when you search, which tells you how few people are writing slow. Violet Crisp (#1) and Sean Duffy (#2) are the two detectives below who are closest to Cassie Maddox and Antoinette Conway: the precinct stopped believing Violet at sixteen, and Duffy’s own colleagues keep a file on him.
1. The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest (2026)
Read this if: the thing you love in French is the place: a community where everyone’s certainty is a wall, and a detective who grew up inside it.
What you’re getting: The Storm Reaper is a love letter to Fire Island, a small barrier island only 60 miles from New York with no cars, one ferry in and out, and a community where err’body knows everybody’s business. The determined detective is Violet Crisp, who at 16 watched her best friend get swept away in a Nor’easter and saw a man murdered on the same beach. The old chief told her she was making things up for attention. Ten years later, a body washes ashore after a hurricane with injuries that don’t match drowning, and the new chief is the first person in authority to actually listen. First in the Violet Crisp series. Released June 1, 2026.
Why French fans will like it: Tana French does atmospheric Dublin procedural with detectives her squad doesn’t fully trust. The Storm Reaper does atmospheric Fire Island procedural with a detective her precinct stopped listening to a decade ago. Different patch of bog, SAME psychological engine. I started in comedy, five nights a week of standup and improv, first in Shanghai, then in Los Angeles. When COVID shut the stages down I turned to writing and never went back. My editor is always trying to take the jokes out of the scary scenes. So The Storm Reaper reads like a Tana French book that occasionally lets the protagonist breathe. Of the eight here, this is the one where the weather runs the clock: a hurricane decides what washes ashore and when, and Violet has ten years of storm logs that say the bodies aren’t accidents.
What readers say: From Goodreads, verbatim:
- “The storm aspect of the story and the way Violet’s character was written to be very knowledgeable in regard to barrier islands, storms and the overall impact of such storms on a barrier island added a layer to the story that had me hooked from the first chapter.” (Robyn Reads)
- “At the heart of the story is Violet Crisp, a flawed and compelling main character whose voice feels raw and real.” (Estelle Bouldin)
- “I can’t wait to see what the next chapter brings about for the residents of Fire Island.” (Mary)
The Storm Reaper Trailer
2. The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty (2012)
Read this if: you’ve finished all six Dublin Murder Squad books and want the political-procedural extension.
What you’re getting: Sean Duffy is a Catholic detective in the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1981 Belfast, a job description that means his neighbors hate him for working for the British state and his colleagues distrust him because of his religion. The IRA has him on a list. Bobby Sands is dying in the H-Blocks. Then a body turns up in an alley with its hand cut off and a Puccini score arranged on its chest, and a second body follows with the opposite hand cut off, and Duffy realizes he might be the only detective in Northern Ireland with both the freedom and the obligation to investigate Belfast’s first serial killer. First in the Sean Duffy series.
Why French fans will like it: McKinty does what French does: slow-burn first-person psychological procedural where the protagonist’s outsider position inside his own institution is the second case running alongside the first. Duffy’s relationship to the RUC is the same architecture as Cassie Maddox’s relationship to Murder Squad. The Belfast Troubles atmospheric (checkpoint culture, sectarian geography, the specific sound of a Land Rover’s diesel idling outside your house at 3 AM) is doing what French’s Iron Age archaeological site does in In the Woods.
Fair warning: First person and heavy on 1981 politics. If you skipped the history in Faithful Place, you’ll skip some here too.
3. Garnethill by Denise Mina (1998)
Read this if: you want Maureen O’Donnell, a suspect with a psychiatric file, to solve the murder the Glasgow polis pinned on her.
What you’re getting: Maureen O’Donnell wakes up in her Glasgow flat and finds her therapist boyfriend tied to a chair in the living room with his throat cut. The Glasgow polis are not being delicate about their working theory that Maureen, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse with a psychiatric history, is the killer. Maureen knows she didn’t do it and starts running her own investigation through Glasgow’s mental-health system, which is where she finds out exactly how many other women her boyfriend hurt before he died. Mina’s debut. Won the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger for best debut. First of a trilogy.
Why French fans will like it: Garnethill is the closest 1998 novel to what French would publish a decade later. First-person Maureen running her own psychological investigation through institutional indifference. Glasgow tenement architecture doing the work French’s Dublin suburbs would later do. A protagonist whose past makes her exactly the wrong person to be believed and exactly the right person to know what she’s looking for. Mina is the godmother of the lane French perfected.
Fair warning: Content note for childhood sexual abuse, which is part of Maureen’s history and the plot.
4. The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths (2009)
Read this if: the Iron Age dig in In the Woods was your favorite part.
What you’re getting: Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist at the University of North Norfolk, single, 39, in love with the salt marsh that surrounds her isolated cottage. Then a child’s bones turn up at the edge of the marsh and the local DCI Harry Nelson asks Ruth to date them, hoping they belong to a girl who disappeared a decade ago. The bones are Iron Age. But while Ruth is at the dig site, fresh footprints appear, then fresh threats, and Harry Nelson realizes the killer is using the salt marsh as a hunting ground. First in the Ruth Galloway series, 15 books long, and winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award.
Why French fans will like it: If you loved the way Tana French uses the dig site to suggest that what’s buried doesn’t always stay buried, Crossing Places is the series that made that subgenre a category. Griffiths writes Ruth Galloway as a complete adult woman with a body, a job, a sense of humor, and a complicated relationship to a married detective. The Norfolk salt marsh becomes a recurring character across the series, doing exactly what French’s settings do: a place that knows more than the people walking on it. If Ruth Galloway is the part you came for, I keep a longer list of female detective thriller books and a separate one on the best female detective series to move in with.
Fair warning: Cozier than anything else here. The slow burn is gentler, and the Ruth-and-Nelson will-they-won’t-they runs 15 books.
Quick aside, if the Tana French shelf you specifically came here for is the Cal Hooper / rural Ireland line (The Searcher, The Hunter, The Keeper), I covered that lane in my Wind River readalike post. Different angle, complementary list.
Fire Island keeps its secrets in the storm surge.
Get the first few chapters of The Storm Reaper free — a small-town procedural where the detective everyone wrote off ten years ago is the only one still tracking the truth. Violet was sixteen when nobody believed her about what she saw. Now she’s the cop carrying the case nobody else thinks exists.
★★★★
“At the heart of the story is Violet Crisp, a flawed and compelling main character whose voice feels raw and real.”
— Estelle Bouldin, Goodreads Reviewer
Read the First 6 Chapters Free →5. Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (2006)
Read this if: you want Broken Harbour’s “the town already solved it” tension with island weather and an ensemble worth eight books.
What you’re getting: Shetland, the day after New Year’s. A teenage girl is found murdered in the snow on the way home from a party. The whole island closes ranks around its own theory of who did it: Magnus Tait, the village’s quiet middle-aged outcast who’s lived under suspicion for the disappearance of another girl years before. Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, Shetlander by birth, Fair Isle by heritage, half-Spanish (the island has held the name “Perez” since the Armada wreck in 1588), is the only investigator on the island who isn’t certain Magnus did anything. First in the Shetland series, eight books, and the source of the BBC’s Shetland.
Why French fans will like it: Raven Black is the Shetland-archipelago version of Broken Harbour. Atmospheric island procedural, detective who’s read by his community as one of them but is secretly outside the consensus, a community case that’s already been “solved” by gossip before the actual investigation begins. Cleeves’ Shetland is doing exactly what French’s outer-Dublin housing estate does in Broken Harbour: a place where everyone’s certainty about the answer is a wall the detective has to break. (Of the two island books on this list, Cleeves gives you the ensemble; mine gives you the storm.)
Fair warning: Third person and a touch more traditional whodunit than French. Fans who want her interiority sometimes find Perez held at arm’s length.
6. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001)
Read this if: In the Woods’s unsolved childhood case is the wound you want reopened.
What you’re getting: Three eleven-year-old boys are playing street hockey in 1975 East Buckingham, Massachusetts. A car pulls up. A man pretending to be a cop tells one of them, Dave Boyle, to get in. Dave gets in. Twenty-five years later, the three boys are men in the same neighborhood. Sean Devine is a state trooper. Jimmy Marcus runs a corner store and an old criminal life he’s trying to put down. Dave Boyle is something else. Then Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old daughter Katie is murdered, and the case Sean Devine catches forces him to investigate the friendship Dave never quite came back from. Winner of the Anthony and Barry Awards. Adapted into the 2003 Eastwood film with Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Marcia Gay Harden, which won two Oscars, for Penn and Robbins.
Why French fans will like it: Sean Devine isn’t fighting his department; he’s fighting the unspoken neighborhood agreement that some things from 1975 don’t get talked about. Lehane is the American writer who taught a generation of slow-burn novelists, and French herself has named Mystic River as a book that blurs mystery, social history and family saga. The case is always the second case. The first case is the one nobody told you was still open.
Fair warning: It’s the darkest book on the list. Katie Marcus is nineteen, and Lehane does not let anyone off.
7. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
Read this if: you want French’s psychology with the whodunit removed.
What you’re getting: Six classics students at a tiny Vermont liberal arts college spend a fall semester reading Greek under a charismatic professor and end up, over the course of one semester, committing a murder. The first chapter tells you who killed whom. The remaining 550 pages are the slow-burn psychological investigation of why, and what it does to the five who survive. Tartt’s debut. Tana French has called it “one of the most breathtakingly suspenseful murder mysteries I’ve ever read.”
Why French fans will like it: The Secret History is the inverted-mystery cousin of the Tana French shelf. Tartt removes the whodunit and keeps everything else: atmospheric setting, slow-burn psychological depth, detective-as-narrator (Richard is functionally investigating his own complicity in the murder he describes from page one), community-of-silence dynamics. It’s also the literary ancestor of every “the gaslighter knows you can’t trust your own perception” psychological thriller written since. The word “gaslighting” itself comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, in which a husband systematically dims the gas lamps in their home and then tells his wife she’s imagining it, a deliberate campaign to make her believe she’s losing her mind so he can steal jewels hidden in the house. It became Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2022 (1,740% search surge). The Secret History runs that exact engine on six liberal arts students who spend the back half of the novel gaslighting each other about what they did in the woods.
Fair warning: 550 pages and no detective. If you need a cop in the room, skip to #8.
8. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (2019)
Read this if: you want the Murder Squad’s rotating-lead trick done inside one novel.
What you’re getting: The opening chapter is a kidnapping in Petropavlovsk, the largest city on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, a remote volcanic peninsula in the country’s far east, accessible only by plane, geographically isolated from the rest of Russia. Two sisters, eight and eleven, are taken from a beach in broad daylight. The remaining twelve chapters follow twelve different women on the peninsula in the year after, each one circling the case from a different angle, each chapter a self-contained portrait that lays one more piece of evidence about who took the girls and why. National Book Award finalist. Phillips’ debut.
Why French fans will like it: Disappearing Earth is the experimental cousin on this list. It’s a procedural in structure but an interconnected literary novel in execution. French would recognize the technique because she does the same Dublin Murder Squad rotation across six books, each lead a peripheral character in the previous book’s case. Phillips compresses that rotation into one volume across one community on Kamchatka. The peninsula itself does the work, its isolation, its colonial history, its layered ethnic communities (Even, Itelmen, Russian), and by the final chapter you’ve understood the case through twelve separate lives, none of them the actual detective working it.
Fair warning: Twelve narrators means you leave every one of them after a chapter. Readers who bonded with Cassie for a whole book sometimes bounce off this.
Which one should you read tonight?
- A detective to live with for 400 pages: The Cold Cold Ground, then the rest of the Duffy books.
- Weather, water and a town that already decided: The Storm Reaper if you want the storm clock and a woman nobody believed; Raven Black if you want the ensemble.
- The literary cousins: The Secret History for the inverted case, Disappearing Earth for twelve angles on one crime.
Why we need slow-burn detective fiction
The reason this shelf matters more in 2026 than it did in 2007 (when In the Woods came out) is that almost everything else has gotten faster. AI Overview answers your question in three sentences. TikTok summarizes a 400-page novel in 90 seconds. Most contemporary thrillers are explicitly built to be skimmed. Slow-burn detective fiction is the opposite. It’s the argument that some kinds of understanding only happen if you stay inside someone’s head for two weeks of reading, and the genre is built to deliver exactly that because it refuses to be fast.
[Read Next + “She’s been building this case for ten years” CTA block stay here]
FAQ
Where should I start with Tana French if I haven’t read any of her books?
Most readers start with In the Woods (2007), the first Dublin Murder Squad novel and the book that established her style. Some French fans argue Broken Harbour (2012) is the better entry point because it’s more self-contained and the case structure is tighter. If you want her standalone work, The Witch Elm (2018) doesn’t require any prior context. If you want her rural-Ireland Cal Hooper line, start with The Searcher (2020).
What books are most similar to Tana French?
The closest stylistic cousin is Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series (starting with The Cold Cold Ground, 2012), atmospheric Belfast Troubles procedural with the same outsider-detective-inside-his-own-institution engine. The closest American descendant is Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. The closest experimental cousin is Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth. For a barrier-island contemporary with a female detective her precinct stopped listening to, my own thriller The Storm Reaper is on this list at #1, same psychological engine, different geography.
Are Tana French’s books a series? Can I read them out of order?
The Dublin Murder Squad books (In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbour, The Secret Place, The Trespasser) share a setting and rotate leads, each book’s protagonist was a peripheral character in the previous book’s case. You can read them out of order; each is self-contained. But reading in order rewards you with character continuity. The Cal Hooper books (The Searcher, The Hunter, The Keeper) are a separate trilogy, best read in order. The Witch Elm is a standalone.
What are the best books like Tana French if you loved In the Woods specifically?
The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths is the closest match for In the Woods‘s archaeology, and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane is the closest for its unsolved childhood case. In the Woods splits those two threads, a dig site and a detective’s missing memory of 1984, and these two novels each take one. For the Dublin Murder Squad’s full “detective her own squad doesn’t trust” engine, The Cold Cold Ground and The Storm Reaper both run it, in Belfast and on Fire Island.
If you like Tana French, you should read which author first?
Start with Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series if you want the closest match in voice, since both write first-person detectives who are outsiders inside their own police force. Start with Denise Mina’s Garnethill if you want the female-led version, published nine years before In the Woods. Both are the first books of series, eight and three volumes long.
What should you read after Tana French if you’ve finished The Keeper?
The Keeper (Viking, March 31, 2026) closed the Cal Hooper trilogy, and Tana French has not announced a next book. Of the eight books here, The Storm Reaper and Raven Black are the two that come closest to the Cal Hooper village: a small community with its own verdict about a death, and a detective who has to break it. Readers who want more rural Ireland rather than more French should start with the Wind River readalike list linked under #4.
What makes a slow-burn detective novel different from a regular thriller?
A slow-burn detective novel spends its pages inside the detective’s head, so the case gets solved through understanding people rather than through forensic tricks or a twist. In the Woods runs past 400 pages and spends most of them on Rob Ryan’s missing memory of the summer of 1984, which is why its fans describe it as a book you live in for two weeks rather than finish in a night.
Will The Storm Reaper appeal to Tana French fans specifically?
Yes, that’s the most direct match on the list. The Storm Reaper launches June 1, 2026, and runs the same engine as French’s Dublin Murder Squad books: atmospheric setting (Fire Island barrier island), close-third psychological narration from the detective (Violet Crisp), a precinct that doesn’t fully trust her, and a case that’s been carrying community silence for a decade before the new body washes ashore. Available now.
Is Tana French still writing?
Yes. The Keeper (Viking, March 31, 2026) is her most recent novel and the third and final Cal Hooper book, set in the same west-of-Ireland village as The Searcher and The Hunter. It was an instant New York Times bestseller. With the Cal Hooper trilogy closed, the open question is whether she returns to the Dublin Murder Squad. In the meantime, the eight books on this list are the closest readalikes available.
Some links in this post are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you buy through them — at no extra cost to you.
Leave a Reply