Retired Chicago policeman Cal Hooper finds a small Irish village isn’t as bucolic as he imagined.

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One of my goals for the late-in-life deep dive into murder mysteries is to read offerings from writers from a variety of cultures and countries. Which is how I ended up last month in a bookstore in Dublin looking for a crime mystery by an Irish writer. The booksellers gave options, but one name kept popping up (albeit an “American-Irish” writer) and a standalone novel by that writer was mentioned as a book worth the read.

And even though it took an entire eight-hour flight (and then some) to finish, the “tense, slow-burning thriller” more than met the hype.

The Searcher (2020) by Tana French begins as Cal Hooper, after twenty-five years in the Chicago police force, moves to a small rural Irish village seeking a fresh start. Having survived a broken marriage and drained by the demands of his job, Cal is seeking nothing more than a small fixer-upper, land to walk, time to think, and a good pub. But as he is cooking a hamburger with Steve Earle blasting on the speaker, the back of his neck suddenly flares . . . a habit trained by his time in Chicago. He’s being watched. And into his search for a new start walks a local kid who comes looking for help. Trey’s brother is missing and no one seems to care. Cal doesn’t want to get involved but he also cannot bring himself to walk away.

Slowly (French is a great writer, but she loves atmospheric detail . . . so everything evolves at a snail’s pace) Trey comes to trust Cal and the former cop comes to care about finding answers in a village that likes to hide secrets. Trey Reddy and Brendan, the missing brother, come from a broken family where the father has left and the mother is doing all she can to hold it together. The folks in the village—beginning with Cal’s neighbor Mart—warn him to stay away from the Reddys and the search for Brendan, but that’s not in Cal’s nature.

Cal is used to finding answers, but one thing he quickly discovers is that he’s virtually alone in this quest. There is no Chicago police tech department or crime scene unit to help him locate a missing person. The local police are less than helpful and he knows that if he calls in units from Dublin when the seriousness of the crime is revealed he’ll never find peace among his neighbors. He’s come to Ireland looking for paradise but ends up in a place shrouded in secrecy, economic troubles, and never-forgotten history. That’s simply life in his rural promised land.

The characters in The Searcher are richly drawn, beginning with Cal and Trey but including a local widow Lena, who everyone wants to hook up with Cal, Lena’s sister who runs the local general store, and Mart the neighbor. As we learn more about each of these characters, and as Cal finds out that Brendan’s life was much different from that provided by Trey’s perspective, the story is propelled forward. It is a violent path at times and as is true with many modern crime novels, the ending isn’t clean . . . there are moral dilemmas to be wrestled with. But Trey and Cal get answers not only about Brendan but also about each other and the village they now call home.

French wrote The Searcher after winning initial fame as the author of six Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries. She has now taken Cal’s story . . . and that of Trey and Lena . . . to produce a follow-up novel. In The Hunter we apparently learn that Cal’s built a relationship with Lena and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy “from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places” until Trey’s long-absent father reappears. I now have a copy of that sequel and will begin looking to carve out the time to read another well-written but slow-burning (the perfect description) novel from the Irish countryside.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Irish countryside from Unsplash