The Book:
The Searcher by Tana French, 2020
The Characters:
Cal Hooper, retired detective
Trey Reddy, the child with the missing brother Brendan
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
Retired detective Cal Hooper moves to a remote village in rural Ireland. His plans are to fix up the dilapidated cottage he’s bought, to walk the mountains, to put his old police instincts to bed forever.
Then a local boy appeals to him for help. His brother is missing, and no one in the village, least of all the police, seems to care. And once again, Cal feels that restless itch.
Something is wrong in this community, and he must find out what, even if it brings trouble to his door.
Trey is a girl, and Cal thought she was a boy until his neighbor told him. This made Cal nervous, given how much time she had been spending with him alone. He sends her away and tries to put the mystery behind him, but then one night she shows up on his doorstep beat up. Her mother had done it, to stop Trey from asking questions about her missing brother.
The next night, Cal gets beat up as well. Trey saves him by shooting one of his attackers in the arm with Cal’s rifle.
The Twist:
The attackers turned out to be a bunch of the old men that Cal had become friendly with. Brendan had gotten messed up in cooking meth, and the old men didn’t want that sort of thing in their town. When the old men tried to teach Brendan a lesson, he fell from a punch and hit his head and died.
The Ending:
Cal decided to stay in Ireland to be a mentor to Trey, and bought her a puppy.
The Review:
Tana French referred to The Searcher as “her take on a western”. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a western, and maybe it means something different in Irish literature, but to me a western means cowboys, not cops!
Cal was a great character. I liked his desire to reset his morals after years of being a Chicago cop. I loved that as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t abandon Trey and his search for his brother.
The best part about this book was the setting–the fictional town of Ardnakelty in the west of Ireland. Tana French paints a beautiful picture of the sprawling farms and close-knit community. Many of the conversations with the old men made me chuckle (“what’s a yeet?”). I appreciated how even the most innocuous of conversations often had double meanings towards how Cal was fitting in with the town.
She does spend a lot of time describing various aspects of Cal’s home repair projects, but I didn’t mind that. Nor did I mind the lengthy descriptions of puppies–it just made me miss when my dog was a newborn!
I enjoyed The Searcher, but it didn’t feel like a Tana French book. I’ve read In The Woods and The Witch Elm, and didn’t find The Searcher to be quite as creepy or suspenseful. It was a slow, calm mystery instead of the thrillers we usually see from her, and I can definitely see why hard-core fans of hers wouldn’t like this change of pace.
I always find her books to be slow and meandering (although I only have a small sample) which I am fine with when I go into a novel expecting that. I only get bored when I start a book expecting a fast-paced thriller and am confronted with pages and pages of colorful descriptions.
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