By Miriam R. Kramer

I fell in love with Tana French’s writing when I discovered her Edgar Award–winning first novel, In the Woods, in a stack of international mysteries at Olsson’s Books & Records, where I worked on South Union Street in Old Town. Her Dublin Murder Squad chain of tales comprised the backstories and inner visions of detectives who feature briefly in other books in the series. Linking up all these views of private lives, I felt like I was entering French’s own solar system, with each personality a compelling world of its own. It gave me a glimpse of Ireland through crime, nostalgia, eerie peripheral vision, corruption, and outrage at injustice. Her recent duology, The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2024), leaves the Murder Squad but not the murders behind, focusing on the inhabitants of a rural Irish town and the retired American police officer, Cal Hooper, who roots himself there.

Recently divorced and weary after twenty-five years on the Chicago police force, Hooper retires to Ardnakelty in the west of Ireland, choosing it as the ideal place to find quiet and a less stressful existence. He finds a small community that appears peaceful with its agrarian beauty and independence from big city bustle. He discovers that its secrets are locked away, although long-term residents know each other’s histories and dirty laundry.

As he works to patch up his dilapidated house, he gradually becomes involved in the town’s business. Trey Reddy, a kid from a ne’er-do-well family living on the nearby mountain, commandeers him to assist her in finding her missing older brother, Brendan. At thirteen, Trey travels through life like a feral cat, operating on her own because her father left her exhausted mother with three younger children, Trey, and Brendan to mind. The town sees the Reddys as poor and worthless, leaving Trey outside of local culture like Cal himself. She asks him for help because she has no one else.

As a mystery The Searcher builds tension slowly, while French adds atmosphere with her detailed depictions of natural beauty, tart-tongued villagers, Cal’s adjustment to local living, and the trust that gradually develops between him and Trey. This novel is no thriller. It is a twig-by-twig nest, a character study with a menacing thread that becomes more apparent as it winds through the story.

The second book, The Hunter, builds upon the previous mystery. Trey has grown older and closer to Cal Hooper. As a maturing teenager, she helps him construct and refurbish furniture for the community. He grows to love her as his own child, helping her build her worth and position in Ardnakelty through teaching her the life skills she would never receive at home.

While pulling back from the residents after the events in The Searcher, Cal becomes involved with a local, independent woman named Lena, who also stays shy of most doings in the town. He eventually joins a venture with area farmers only to protect Trey from them and herself. Trey’s gladhanding wastrel of a father re-appears with a get-rich-quick scheme for locals—one that inadvertently offers Trey an opportunity for vengeance against the community that has hurt her with its secrets and tendency to problem solve without the law on its side.

Tana French writes gorgeous prose. An exceptionally gifted novelist, French could describe wallpaper and make you happy. That being said, the first of these two books moves very slowly. If you are a fan of the Dublin Murder Squad’s story lines and pace, you may not want to trudge through a plot that creeps along for at least the first hundred out of 450 pages. I prefer her previous series because it offers compelling character building with more action. I hope she will return to it someday.

The second-person narration in these books removed me from the immediacy and fever-dream quality that made her other first-person works so propulsive and poignant. Her prose has changed from the dazzling, running-brook descriptions of the characters who inhabit In the Woods. She has adopted a streamlined, tight narrative style that started becoming evident in her most recent Dublin Murder Squad book, The Passenger, and her first separate novel, The Witch Elm.

If you read The Hunter as the second work in this duology, you will find it easier to move forward than in the first. Even if you are reading it as a stand-alone novel, you will proceed faster with a plot that quickly reveals complicated relationships and possibilities for imminent danger.

Although Cal Hooper and Trey Reddy are the two most prominent individuals in these books, an equally important character is the town of Ardnakelty itself. Feeding off links and enmities between neighbors, Ardnakelty supports both the camaraderie and suffocating atmosphere of an insular culture. It instinctively closes ranks against visitors, whether they be an American ex-cop or law enforcement from another part of Ireland. In the end, Cal, Trey, and any allies must navigate and come to terms with it or suffer the consequences.