Tana French and Megan Abbott live Zoom event

When: 4 p.m. Oct. 14 Details: Ticketed event with purchase of “The Searcher” from Murder by the

Book; murderbooks.com mysteries.” Her work has been compared to that of writers as varied as Thomas Hardy, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy and Donna Tartt. Among peers, she’s admired by Marlon James, Stephen King and Gillian Flynn, who has called French’s work “mesmerizing.” Her novels are often less about solving crimes than examining the aftermath of trauma and the unreliable nature of memory as well as the social systems and entrenched class disparities that can give rise to violence.

That is perhaps uncharacteristic for a writer of mysteries, a genre that often demands meticulous planning, French seems to thrive on uncertainty. She concedes that plot is not her strong suit. Rather than mapping out the twists and turns of an investigation, she starts with a character and a setting and feels her way to a story.

“Then I dive in and hope there’s going to be a book at the end,” she said.

French, who is 47 and has dual American and Italian citizenship, traces her comfort with ambiguity to her nomadic upbringing. Born in Vermont, she grew up on several continents, as her family moved around for her father’s job as a developmental economist — to Florence, Italy; then Washington, D.C.; then Lilongwe, Malawi; then Rome.

Relocating so frequently made her a keen observer of cultural subtleties. “Every couple of years you had to start over, trying to decode a new place,” she said. “Reordering yourself was part of my childhood. It shows up a lot in what I do.” She’s lived in Dublin, where she went to Trinity College, since 1990.

French didn’t start writing seriously until she was 30. For years, she worked as an actor, a career that felt natural for someone who was used to instability.

In 2002, when she was between jobs and found work on an archaeological dig near a forest, a dark thought lodged in her brain: She imagined what would happen if a group of children went into the woods to play and only one came out. She jotted the idea down but didn’t start writing until a year later.

It turned into her first novel, “In the Woods,” which featured Rob Ryan, a detective whose investigation into a girl’s murder takes him back to the same woods where, as a boy, he witnessed a crime so horrific that he blocked it from his memory.

Her debut received ecstatic reviews and several prizes, including the Edgar Award for best first novel.

With “The Searcher,” she adds the issues of systemic racism and police violence. She was wary at first of writing about police brutality as a white writer living in Ireland, where killings by police officers are rare.

“I was reluctant to touch on the U.S. side of this at all,” French said. “I’m not convinced that I have any right to speak about that.”

But she felt she needed a reason for why the novel’s retired policeman left America in disillusionment. So she gave him a back story in which he harbors regrets over his role in a near-fatal shooting, when his partner fired at a fleeing Black teenager. After the incident, Cal corroborated his partner’s story that the teen was reaching for something in his pocket, even though Cal didn’t quite believe that.

Lately, French has been rereading “vast quantities of Agatha Christie,” which she compared to comfort food. “I know everything will be sorted out in a couple of hundred pages,” she said.

No one would say the same about a Tana French novel.