It pains me to give a Tana French novel 3 stars, this was one of my most anticipated reads of 2020. I'm still waiting for another Dublin Murder Squad book, but this wasn't half-bad. It's got the crime-solving excitement of the DMS books, but with an additional obstacle to overcome. Puts him in a strange land and lets him feel it out for himself. She takes this Chicago cop who's used to having guns, pals on the force, and a back-up team at his disposal, and she strips all his resources and defenses away.
I think, in the end, French really wanted to experiment by placing a stranger in the Irish setting she's by now so familiar with.
In other words, the kind where people yell over one another to compete to be seen as the most moral, or "woke", but of course French doesn't use that word. Police shootings feature, as does a critique of social media morality. The comradeship and camaraderie between locals, which he so admired initially, begins to take on a threatening hue.įrench hits on a couple of current issues, too, weaving them in subtly. Soon he is finding out that the idyllic place he imagined, the place of "no handguns, no copperheads or cottonmouths or rattlesnakes, no bobcats or bears or coyotes, no black widows, not even a mosquito" actually might be hiding all kinds of untold dangers. Instead, Cal gets caught up in the disappearance of a local boy. Into this wilderness comes an American ex-cop looking to settle down for a peaceful life. Hands get dirty, animals get killed, skinned, and eaten, not necessarily in that order.
The Searcher takes place out in rural Ireland, an isolated place of farms and local folk who've known each other's nasty business for decades. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one that comes to mind.įrench returns to what I feel she does best with this book: grit and grime. I also really liked the dynamic between the two main characters in The Searcher - Cal and Trey - and would liken it to a couple of other book relationships I've enjoyed, but it would be a bit of a spoiler to do so. Cal was far more interesting to me than Toby from her previous book. That being said, once I did make it past those first hundred pages and finally settled into the rhythm of this story, I began to really enjoy it. Neither this book nor The Witch Elm have grabbed me as fully as her Dublin Murder Squad books always did. The Searcher was another slow-starter from French, in my opinion. Goodreads tells me I was reading this latest Tana French book for twelve days, though I'd say a good ten of those days was getting through just the first hundred pages.
Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.
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