Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series isn’t a detective series in the classic sense. Instead of featuring a static cast of characters solving every case, the cast is a daisy chain, with each new book narrated by a supporting character from a previous volume. 2007’s In the Woods is narrated by one detective; in The Likeness, his former partner takes over; in Faithful Place, her former boss becomes the narrator; and on it goes.

That evolving cast allows French to escape from one of the great problems of the detective story: namely, how to make the detective into someone who changes and evolves over time — a character with a genuine character arc — while also preserving the status quo enough to allow them to continue building their lives around solving mysteries. French’s detectives are undone and remade by their cases. In every novel they are taken apart and then put back together again by mysteries that are fiendishly designed to reveal their very worst tendencies. And at the end of the book when they move on, they are always fundamentally changed.