His house needs everything done to it, and he is slowly putting in the hours with the paint and sandpaper when his cop’s sixth-sense tells him someone is watching him. Which comes in handy when he meets thirteen-year-old Trey.Ĭal is two-years single, and for some reason thinks what he wants is a small holding in the middle of nowhere, the local village boasting a shop and a pub and not much else. He’s not a high flying ex-detective either, more a veteran of the beat, well aware of the sorts of crimes committed by the young and the desperate. And our narrator, Cal Hooper, is a retired cop from Chicago, so the narrative voice is quite different too. I expected something similar with The Searcher, but really this is quite a different sort of novel altogether.įor while we back in Ireland, this is rural Ireland, not an Irish city, and we have a very different way of doing things, a slower pace that suits the story as well.

So naturally, I was keen to see what she would come up with next. So he does not sound authentic as the Irish people do.I loved Tana French’s last book, The Wych Elm – a twisty, psychological mystery with loads of secrets, a troubled, unreliable main character and a beguilingly chatty narrative voice. There is a difference between sounding country and sounding stupid.

I understand that she wanted to make clear that he isn’t a big-city guy. Although French writes wonderful dialogue between Irish people, she doesn’t quite get it right with Cal. I don’t give this book five stars because I didn’t like the way Cal talked. Even so, he does get involved in this case, just like old times.Ĭal learns that small towns in Ireland can have the same trouble as big cities in the United States. This is what Cal thought he was leaving behind when he moved to Ireland. He thought it would be a quiet place to live.Ī 13-year-old, who Cal mistakes for a boy, has asked, practically demanded, that he look into the disappearance of her brother. Cal is American, a retired cop who has come to live in a small town in Ireland. That is, the main character of this book isn’t Irish. THE SEARCHER is a bit of a departure for French. In this case I’ll stick with four, though. Reviews of Tana French books never deserve fewer than four stars, and I’m usually inclined to give them five.

Reviews of the searcher by tana french