Tana French and "Benjamin Black": A little news and a question

Unlikely as it may seem (to anyone who has read Irish writer Tana French's In the Woods), French is working on a sequel or maybe a series. The next volume, titled The Likeness, isdue out next spring, featuring the female partner (Cassie) of Ryan, the detective narrator of In the Woods. Cassie has her own dark past (to match Ryan's childhood secrets), both in her college years and in her undercover work prior to joining the fictional murder squad. I have to say I'm intrigued... And on another subject related to Irish crime fiction: is anyone else startled by the eruption of a Jim Thompson-esque subplot (set in Boston) in the middle of John Banville's pseudonymous, set-in-the-'50s crime novel, Christine Falls (written under a totally transparent pseudonym)? The style even seems to shift from the more elegant prose of the central tale of a Dublin pathologist (whose narration, though in the third person, is in the cultured tones of an Irish doctor) to the pugnacious reactions of a guy from Delaware who's trying to claw his way up into the working class in Boston... A review of Christine Falls follows soon.