Review: "The Searcher" by Tana French

The Searcher by Tana French
Published October 2020 via Viking
★★★★

There's never a bad time to read a Tana French book, but it seemed like a particularly good time to pick one up when I saw that the final book in this series will be out in March. The Searcher introduces a new character—Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who has up and moved to rural Ireland. He's looking for a quieter life, a more predictable life. That's not quite what he finds.

If you've read any Tana French, you'll know that one of her (numerous) strengths as a writer is character development. The Searcher is heavy on that: Cal is looking for a missing young man, yes, but he's also looking for answers about what fell apart in his life in Chicago, and for what moving forward might mean. French has a delicate hand with plotting—one of the reasons the book is relatively long, I think, is that this isn't a mystery in which every thread Cal chases down leads him to the next step; this is a mystery in which every thread tells him something, but not necessarily something he can act upon; in Chicago he had a badge and a gun and an entire police force by his side, but in Ireland he's starting from scratch.

I've seen comments that this is a slow book, but I pretty well flew through it. There's a twist midway through that threw me for something of a loop; another twist later on surprised me less (perhaps because it was more the type of twist that I expect in a mystery) but still kept things, well, surprising. I'm still contemplating the "how things went down" part of it (and will be interested to see how various relationships develop over the course of the series), but it was satisfyingly no-good-answers. The thing I'm least convinced by is Cal's ability to distinguish accents—yes, he has a knack for noticing things, but I struggle to think that he's been there long enough to work out which Irish accent is from where. (Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part I wouldn't assume that an average American off the street could distinguish between an Irish accent and a Scottish accent, let alone a Dublin accent and a local village accent.)

Overall, much looking forward to seeing where the rest of the series goes.