Trey skulks around Cal, alternately spying on him and helping him with the house, then hounds him into searching for the boy.
This earns him the attention of 13-year-old Trey, a laconic, scrappy child whose older brother Brendan has been missing for the last six months. He’s “started to get an inkling of how tangled up things get around here, and how carefully you have to watch where you put your feet.” For their part, the townspeople are quick to sniff out whatever information they need about the stranger in their midst.Ĭal hoped to keep his old profession private - having left due to his unease over the practice and politics of American policing - but word gets out that he was a cop. “Cal is in the dark on what he might set in motion” just by sitting on the wrong barstool or talking to the wrong person. Unfortunately for Cal, the people of Ardnakelty have their own intentions, and he has to decipher them from the vulnerable, uncertain position of an outsider who doesn’t know the rules. He’s not a hermit - he’s neighborly, he’ll have a pint with the men in the pub - but he didn’t move across the ocean to become the protagonist of a Tana French novel. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.” He’s bought a fixer-upper and applied for a firearm license, hoping to spend his time restoring the house and hunting rabbits for dinner. “The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better.
It’s the story of a disillusioned man in search of a moral anchor after 25 years in the Chicago PD.įrench has called “The Searcher” her take on a western, and Calvin Hooper is the stranger who comes to town: a divorced, middle-aged, retired cop looking for the quiet life in a small Irish village, the fictional Ardnakelty. This standalone - her second, after 2018’s “ The Witch Elm” - is not a procedural.
French earned her reputation with the Dublin Murder Squad series, six brilliant police procedurals far removed from the muddy swamp of American policing. “ The Searcher” is her eighth novel, and she’s banked a lot of goodwill since her 2007 debut “In the Woods,” with work that is as consistently thoughtful and thought-provoking as it is entertaining. It’s a bold move to publish a novel with an American cop hero in October 2020, but if anyone can get away with it, it might be Irish crime phenom Tana French. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
0 kommentar(er)
