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, at Olsson’s Books & Records, where I worked on South Union Street in Old Town. Her Dublin Murder Squad tales comprise the backstories and inner visions of various detectives. Linking 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, an eerie peripheral vision, corruption, social inequities, and outrage at injustice. Her recent trilogy, The Searcher (2020), The Hunter (2024), and The Keeper leaves the Murder Squad but not murders or deaths behind. It focuses on the inhabitants of a rural Irish town, Ardnakelty, 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 the west of Ireland, choosing it as a place to find quiet. He discovers a small community that appears peaceful with its agrarian beauty and independence from city bustle. In time he discovers sinister secrets locked away, although long-term residents know each other’s histories and dirty laundry.
As he works to patch up his dilapidated cottage, Trey Reddy, a kid from a local ne’er-do-well family, commandeers him to assist her in finding her missing older brother, Brendan. At thirteen, Trey travels through life like a feral cat. She operates on her own after her father leaves her exhausted mother with three younger children, Trey, and Brendan to mind. The town sees the Reddys as poor and worthless, leaving Trey almost as much of an outsider to local culture as Cal himself.
As a mystery The Searcher builds tension slowly, while French adds atmosphere with her detailed depictions of natural beauty, tart-tongued townies, 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 thread of menace 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 like she is his own child, helping her build her worth and position in Ardnakelty through teaching her the life skills she never receives at home.
While resisting involvement with residents after his initial encounters in The Searcher, Cal becomes involved with a local, independent woman named Lena Dunne, who also stays shy of most doings in town. To help establish and protect Cal from local tensions, Lena agrees to a marriage engagement. Against his instincts, Cal also joins a venture with area farmers only to protect Trey from them. Trey’s gladhanding wastrel of a father has reappeared with a get-rich-quick scheme for locals. It inadvertently offers Trey an opportunity for vengeance against the community that has hurt her with its secrets and tendency to solve problems without police involvement.
In The Keeper, Cal and Lena are still engaged two years later. When a local woman engaged to the son of a local powerbroker turns up dead, Cal works with those farmers who have finally become friends to investigate. By now he has established ties in the community with those who care about their land on a deeply instinctive and cultural level.
Tana French has never shied away from focusing on Ireland’s socioeconomic issues. In the Dublin Murder Squad novel Broken Harbor, she describes the devastation left in Ireland after the Irish Tiger economic boom collapsed. Here she touches on the problems for a rural community when young people leave for jobs in cities, weakening traditional social structures and leaving them open to opportunism.
Cal’s network now considers him both a partner and a leader in its cause of keeping the community safe. Lena, who has resisted engagement with Ardnakelty for years, also investigates the young woman’s death, becoming a target while uncovering corruption that threatens to destroy the town.
Tana French writes gorgeous prose. An exceptionally gifted novelist, French could describe a whitewashed wall and bowl you over. That being said, the first and third of these two books move 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 over four hundred pages. I ultimately prefer her previous series because it offers compelling character building with more action.
The second-person narration in these books removed me from the immediacy and fever-dream quality that made her first-person works so propulsive and poignant. Her prose has changed over the years 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 and The Keeper in order as the second and third novels after the Searcher, you may find them a quicker read. That being said, The Keeper is long and dense with descriptions of the land and people that make up Ardnakelty, continuing French’s focus on recalcitrant inhabitants who now show the courage to fight political and corporate powers threatening irrevocable change.
Although Cal Hooper, Trey Reddy, and Lena Dunn are the most prominent individuals in these books, Ardnakelty itself is an equally important, uneasy character of its own. It represents the camaraderie, suffocating atmosphere, iron-clad loyalties, and internal divisions of an insular culture. It instinctively closes ranks against visitors while solving its own problems. In this last novel in the trilogy, Cal, Trey, and Lena, not to mention their allies or opposition, must find a way to navigate and appreciate its complications and nuances or abandon the community altogether.
About the Author: Miriam Kramer worked at Olsson’s Books & Records before it closed in 2008, welcoming Old Town, Alexandria, residents to a unique place where employees with encyclopedic knowledge of literature and music enriched the community. As a global nomad, she has lived, studied, or worked in diverse countries overseas. With her experience writing and studying international affairs, she has promoted democracy, international media, the arts, peace building, and citizen diplomacy during her career.