Reading List

Authors Like Tana French

Q: What should I read after In the Woods?

Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (2001), about three boys and an abduction they never get past, and then French’s own The Likeness (2008), which follows Cassie Maddox from In the Woods.

Q: Does Tana French have a new book?

Her most recent novel is The Keeper (2026), the third and final book in the Cal Hooper trilogy set in the west of Ireland village of Ardnakelty, after The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2024).

Q: Which Tana French book should I read first?

In the Woods (2007), her debut and the first Dublin Murder Squad novel. If you prefer a slower, rural story, start with The Searcher (2020).

Q: Is Tana French like Donna Tartt?

In The Likeness and The Secret Place, very much: both write about a tight group bound by a secret, seen by an outsider who wants in. French adds a police investigation; Tartt gives the death away in the prologue.

In 1984 three twelve-year-olds go into the wood beside their housing estate outside Dublin and only one comes out, gripping a tree, his trainers full of blood and his memory gone. Twenty years later he is a murder detective, and the wood is a crime scene again. That is In the Woods (2007), the debut that won Tana French the Edgar Award for best first novel. Born in Vermont in 1973, raised partly in Ireland, Italy and Malawi, and trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin, she wrote six Dublin Murder Squad novels, each narrated by a different detective, then moved west to the village of Ardnakelty for the Cal Hooper trilogy, which ended with The Keeper in 2026. The ten writers below share her territory: a closed group with a secret, a narrator who cannot be fully trusted, and a place that shapes everyone in it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary crime · Irish psychological fiction · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Tana French, start with Donna Tartt, whose The Secret History is the closest book to The Likeness: a closed circle of students and a death they share. For a childhood crime that shapes three adult lives, read Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. For an Irish narrator you should not trust, read Liz Nugent. Below are seven more, from a 1951 classic to a Nobel laureate’s detective novel.

10 authors like Tana French

A closed circle with a secret

Donna Tartt

American · The Secret History (1992), The Goldfinch (2013)

Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1963 and has published three novels in thirty years. The Secret History is narrated by Richard Papen, a student at a small Vermont college who joins a tight group of classics students and tells you in the prologue that they killed one of their own. The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014.

The obvious companion to The Likeness and The Secret Place: a narrator drawn into a closed, glamorous group whose loyalty to each other is the real crime scene. Tartt gives away the death at the start, so the suspense is about character rather than solution. Suits readers who liked French’s students and housemates more than her procedure.

— Lisanne

Every book by Donna Tartt →

The detective who doubts

Josephine Tey

Scottish · The Franchise Affair (1948), The Daughter of Time (1951)

Josephine Tey was a pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952), from Inverness. In The Daughter of Time her Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant, laid up in hospital, investigates whether Richard III really murdered the princes in the Tower; in 1990 the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the best crime novel of all time. The Franchise Affair turns on whether a teenage girl’s story of abduction is true.

An older root of French’s method. Tey was interested less in who did it than in how a story comes to be believed, and her detective’s confidence in reading faces is part of the problem. Readers who liked The Trespasser, where the case is half about what the police want to be true, will find the same question here, seventy years earlier.

— Lisanne

Why, not who

Ruth Rendell

British · A Judgement in Stone (1977), A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986, as Barbara Vine)

Rendell (1930–2015) wrote more than sixty novels, including the Inspector Wexford series that began with From Doon with Death in 1964. A Judgement in Stone names the killer and the motive in its first sentence. Under the name Barbara Vine she wrote slower psychological novels about family secrets; A Dark-Adapted Eye won the Edgar Award for best novel.

The writer who moved British crime from puzzle to psychology, the ground French builds on. The Barbara Vine novels in particular share French’s interest in an old family crime remembered by someone who was young at the time, as in Faithful Place. A good choice for readers who want the motive to matter more than the clue.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ruth Rendell →

Literary crime with a long memory

Kate Atkinson

British · Case Histories (2004), Life After Life (2013)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). Case Histories introduced Jackson Brodie, a former police officer turned private investigator, who finds himself connecting three old cases in Cambridge; the series reached its sixth book with Death at the Sign of the Rook in 2024.

Atkinson treats crime as French does, as something that happens to families and keeps happening for decades. Her tone is lighter and her plots more braided, but the wounded investigator who cannot leave other people’s losses alone is the same figure as Frank Mackey or Cal Hooper.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kate Atkinson →

A childhood crime that never ends

Dennis Lehane

American · Mystic River (2001), Shutter Island (2003), Small Mercies (2023)

Lehane was born in Dorchester, Boston, in 1965, and most of his fiction is set in the city’s working-class neighbourhoods. Mystic River follows three men who were boys together when one of them was taken away by two strangers posing as police; as adults, the daughter of one is murdered and the other two are drawn back in. Both Mystic River and Shutter Island became major films.

The nearest American match for In the Woods: a boyhood trauma in a specific place that shapes adult lives, and a murder investigation that keeps reopening it. Lehane’s world is more male and more violent than French’s, but the sense that a neighbourhood remembers everything is the same.

— Lisanne

The outsider in a small town

Jane Harper

British-Australian · The Dry (2016), The Lost Man (2018)

Harper was born in Manchester in 1980 and moved to Australia as a child. The Dry sends federal agent Aaron Falk back to the drought-stricken farming town he left under suspicion as a teenager, for the funeral of a childhood friend accused of killing his family. It won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger.

Read alongside The Searcher and The Hunter. Harper, like French in Ardnakelty, makes the landscape and a town’s unspoken rules the real antagonist, and her investigators are men carrying something from their past into a place that will not talk to them.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jane Harper →

The Irish narrator you should not trust

Liz Nugent

Irish · Unravelling Oliver (2014), Lying in Wait (2016), Strange Sally Diamond (2023)

Nugent was born in Dublin in 1967 and worked as a stage manager, including on tour with Riverdance, before writing fiction. Unravelling Oliver opens with a respected author beating his wife into a coma and then works backwards to explain him; Lying in Wait begins with a judge’s wife admitting to a killing. Strange Sally Diamond won Crime Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards in 2023, and The Truth About Ruby Cooper followed in 2026.

Nugent shares French’s Dublin and her gift for a first-person voice that is persuasive and wrong. Where French’s detectives deceive themselves, Nugent’s narrators deceive you on purpose. Suits readers who found The Witch Elm the most unsettling French novel.

— Lisanne

Dublin noir, under another name

John Banville

Irish · The Sea (2005), Christine Falls (2006, as Benjamin Black)

Banville was born in Wexford in 1945 and won the Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005. As Benjamin Black he began the Quirke series with Christine Falls: a pathologist in 1950s Dublin finds his brother-in-law altering the file of a young woman who died in childbirth, and uncovers a trade in babies protected by powerful Catholic families.

Banville’s Dublin is older and darker than French’s, but the city is just as much a character, and the crimes are about institutions and families protecting themselves. A good bridge for readers who want French’s Ireland with less procedure and more fog.

— Lisanne

Crime from the victim’s side

Denise Mina

Scottish · Garnethill (1998), The Long Drop (2017), Conviction (2019)

Mina was born in East Kilbride in 1966 and lives in Glasgow. Garnethill, in which a young woman wakes to find her boyfriend murdered in her living room, won the John Creasey Dagger for best first crime novel. The Long Drop retells the 1958 trial of the Glasgow serial killer Peter Manuel and won the Gordon Burn Prize and the McIlvanney Prize in 2017.

Mina asks the question French returns to in The Witch Elm: what happens to the person a crime is done to, and to people who are not believed. Her Glasgow is rougher and funnier than French’s Dublin, and her protagonists are rarely police.

— Lisanne

The detective story taken apart

Kazuo Ishiguro

British, born in Japan · The Remains of the Day (1989), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England as a small child. He won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. When We Were Orphans is narrated by Christopher Banks, a celebrated London detective of the 1930s who returns to Shanghai to solve the disappearance of his parents, and whose account of himself grows steadily less reliable.

Ishiguro complicates French rather than resembling her. Both write narrators who misremember their own childhoods, but Ishiguro uses the detective form to show how little detection can recover. Read When We Were Orphans after In the Woods and the two books argue with each other.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

Where to start if you loved Tana French

If you loved The Likeness, read Donna Tartt.

The Secret History: a closed group of students, a shared death, and a narrator who wants to belong.

If you loved In the Woods, read Dennis Lehane.

Mystic River: a childhood abduction that shapes three adult lives in one neighbourhood.

If you loved The Searcher, read Jane Harper.

The Dry: a man returns to a rural town that decided what happened long before he arrived.

If you want the classic behind it, read Josephine Tey.

The Daughter of Time: a detective in a hospital bed questions a story everyone already believes.

If you want more Tana French, go back to the start.

Read the Dublin Murder Squad novels from In the Woods (2007), then the Cal Hooper trilogy from The Searcher (2020) to The Keeper (2026).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Tana French

Who writes like Tana French?

Donna Tartt is the closest for closed groups and secrets, Dennis Lehane for a childhood crime that shapes adult lives, and Liz Nugent for an Irish narrator you cannot trust. Jane Harper is the best match for the Cal Hooper novels.

What should I read after In the Woods?

Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (2001), about three boys and an abduction they never get past, and then French’s own The Likeness (2008), which follows Cassie Maddox from In the Woods.

Does Tana French have a new book?

Her most recent novel is The Keeper (2026), the third and final book in the Cal Hooper trilogy set in the west of Ireland village of Ardnakelty, after The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2024).

Which Tana French book should I read first?

In the Woods (2007), her debut and the first Dublin Murder Squad novel. If you prefer a slower, rural story, start with The Searcher (2020).

Do the Dublin Murder Squad books need to be read in order?

No. Each novel is narrated by a different detective, usually one who appeared as a secondary character in an earlier book, so they stand alone; reading in order lets you meet each narrator from the outside first.

Is Tana French like Donna Tartt?

In The Likeness and The Secret Place, very much: both write about a tight group bound by a secret, seen by an outsider who wants in. French adds a police investigation; Tartt gives the death away in the prologue.

Sources

List last reviewed 30 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Tana French

10 authors like Tana French

Donna Tartt

Josephine Tey

Ruth Rendell

Kate Atkinson

Dennis Lehane

Jane Harper

Liz Nugent

John Banville

Denise Mina

Kazuo Ishiguro

Where to start if you loved Tana French

Frequently asked questions about authors like Tana French

Who writes like Tana French?

What should I read after In the Woods?

Does Tana French have a new book?

Which Tana French book should I read first?

Do the Dublin Murder Squad books need to be read in order?

Is Tana French like Donna Tartt?

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