never came back and has kept Holly scrupulously away from his folks. "You don't meet my family," he explains to his middle-class ex, "you open hostilities."

Frank meant to run much further away; he planned to emigrate to England with his girlfriend, Rosie, on the night he left for good, 22 years ago. But Rosie never showed, and he'd always assumed she decided to leave without him. "Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark," he says of this turning point, "huge and solid as a mountain." He blamed his "crazy" family for scaring her away. He never got out of Dublin, but he could not have settled on a more emphatic way of sticking his thumb in the collective eye of Faithful Place than by becominga cop.

So when Rosie's mouldering suitcase and then the bones of Rosie herself turn up in a derelict house on Faithful Place, Frank feels the mountain of that ancient rejection shift, "flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more." He enters into a complex and destabilizing negotiation with his own past and its legacy as he searches for Rosie's killer. He sees his parents again, sits on the stoop with his four siblings, feeling how "we fit together like pieces of a jigsaw," and tries to ignore the way the painstakingly constructed barrier between himself and Faithful Place begins to erode. The more he tells himself that he's utterly changed, the