As the tension builds, more mysteries are revealed - the strange slaughter of sheep in the fields, tough strangers from Dublin hanging around, and a growing sense of resentment and suspicion from the townspeople. At first Hooper says no, but slowly he gets sucked into the mystery. Slowly, carefully, Hooper takes the child under his wing, “talking like he would to a stray dog in his yard, steady and even,” and together they work on restoring an old desk he found in the house.īut Trey has an agenda: He wants more than a father figure.

Skittish as a deer, Trey spies on Hooper from the gorse bushes and peers through his windows. The character of Trey is endearing, a near-feral kid who comes from poverty and trauma, like so many of the children in French’s books. It has her keen eye for character, her excellent ear for dialogue and, above all, her narrative control, as she winds the tale tighter and tighter, upping the tension higher and higher. But in other ways the book is classic French. “The Searcher” is a departure for French in all kinds of ways - the third-person narrator, the American protagonist, the rural West of Ireland setting, the abandonment of her beloved Dublin Murder Squad. They creep up on the reader, as they creep up on Hooper. He even likes the rain.īut oh what secrets and danger that landscape holds.

He’s struck by the beauty of the Irish landscape - the stone fences, the green fields, the mountains in the distance, the ever-changing sky. The American outsider is Cal Hooper, a Chicago cop who has gotten divorced, retired early and moved to his ancestral home to find a little peace and quiet. At first, the book hardly seems like a mystery at all - sure, a young man is missing, but no one seems too concerned other than the man’s little brother Trey, and no body turns up, and chances are that the guy probably just left town. “The Searcher,” Tana French’s eighth mystery, is set in the West of Ireland, and for the first 150 pages or so it’s a compelling novel of rural Irish life as seen through the eyes of an American outsider.

Review the searcher tana french