Tana French has been one of my favorite mystery writers for years. She is best known for the six books that make up the Dublin Murder Squad series—creepy, imaginative, and well-written mysteries that feature various detectives from the squad. Her most recent effort has been the trilogy she began with The Searcher and followed with The Hunter. The third and final book of the trilogy, The Keeper, is out March 31.
The series follows the travails of Cal Hooper, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Chicago Police Dept. who has retired and moved to the Irish village of Ardnakelty. He becomes involved with a local woman, Lena, and finds himself a surrogate father to a young girl. It doesn't take long before there's a murder mystery to solve and his talents as a detective are needed.
What I love about this trilogy is that, while the mysteries drive the books forward and are by no means incidental, French delves into a number of other themes along the way. What is it like to be a stranger in a long-established rural community? How do the young of said community face their futures (that old "should I stay or should I go" dilemma)? What to do about a small-town bully? How does a rural area survive these days, given economic pressures and encroaching "civilization"? What happens when decades-long bonds of friendship or blood are tested, stretched to breaking?
Read what French has to say in The Keeper after a fight in the local pub over a development plan:
The things [Cal]'s come to prize in this place are not, mostly, the ones he moved here in search of. The beauty is all there and more, but he was also picturing simplicity and peace, maybe even innocence, none of which showed up in any noticeable quantity. Instead he’s found the intricate webs, constructed over centuries, that bind people to one another, to their land, and to their past. He’s under no illusion that these bindings are simple or innocent, either. They’ve sliced people to the bone, scourged them out of town, choked them to death. But alongside all that, they’ve held the place together, steadfast in the face of time, dark happenings, rifts, attacks, and sieges.
Set in Ireland (which, as another new book in the store points out, has "thirty-two words for field"), it's full of interior ruminations and two-pints-in pub discussions and just great dialogue. You have to settle into The Keeper… it's almost 500 pages long and very talk-y. One of my favorite lines comes after a number of Lena's friends gather for drink and cake (it's a bit more complicated than that but you’ll have to read the book): "I love a bit of do-you-remember."
A few months ago, a customer came into the store after having bought The Searcher. When I asked if she wanted book two, she said, "Oh, I don't know; there's a whole lot of descriptions of weather in that book." "Well," I said, "there's a whole lot of weather in Ireland."
She left with The Hunter and I bet she'll be back for The Keeper.
Carin Pratt is one of the remarkably knowledgeable crew at the Norwich Bookstore—and an ardent recommender of books. Before she landed in these parts, she spent 27 years at CBS News, including two decades as the executive producer of Face the Nation.
