grisly, cynical or edgy, is that the plot begins with a disruption of order (the crime itself) and ends with the restoration of it, albeit in some slightly battered form. The guilty parties are identified and usually punished, secrets are unearthed and, above all, the world returns to intelligibility, however bitter the message it has to tell.

In French's previous two novels -- the mesmerizing "In the Woods" and "The Likeness" -- and now with her third, "Faithful Place," she has introduced the insolvable and the uncertain into the rigorous mathematics of the detective story; she's the Kurt Gödel of crime fiction. A thread of the uncanny runs through "In the Woods," a thread that got finer in "The Likeness," and has in turn entirely vanished from "Faithful Place."In French's novels, the person looking becomes the abyss.

Faithful Place is a cul-de-sac in a part of Dublin called the Liberties, once synonymous with poverty and working-class desperation. "Everyone I grew up with was probably a petty criminal, one way or another, not out of badness but because that was how people got by," Frank observes. He hates Faithful Place not for the crime but for the pettiness -- the pervasive gossip ("a competitive sport that's been raised to Olympic standards") and the narrow, Catholic censoriousness, the shriveled expectations and the cheap melodrama. His father is a brutal drunk and his mother has a black belt in manipulation with added superpowers in guilt, disapproval and schadenfreude. That's why, once he got out at the age of 19, Frank