... an audacious departure for this immensely talented author ... there’s a lot at work in The Searcher, even if its story sounds simple ... One of this book’s many pleasures is French’s way of building Cal and Trey’s bond ... These scenes are keenly observed, with a strong sense of place, and unfailingly entertaining. They’re also ominous, given what we know about the close-knit, gossipy nature of the town ... Nobody beats French when it comes to writing pub scenes fraught with tension ... This is why you read Tana French: for the nuances that go into an ambush like this, and for her ability to immerse you in the moment completely. As you read this scene, the sidelong glances and daggers in the small talk come flying off the page ... Where does The Searcher” stand in the lineup of French’s books? It’s an outlier: not her most accessible but not to be missed. It’s unusually contemplative and visual, as if she literally needed this breath of fresh air. It steps back to examine the policing powers she has traditionally taken for granted. And it’s her foray into the natural world, which is so welcome right now. It’s also slower than some of her other books. But as Cal says in the folksy western voice he often affects here, 'All’s you can do is your best.'
... the great power of this suspense story comes from its slow, measured pacing and the intensifying evil of its atmosphere ... French’s writing...is eerie and nuanced. Indeed, even though her Dublin Murder Squad series and her other stand-alone mystery, The Witch Elm, have been uniformly excellent, this hushed suspense tale about thwarted dreams of escape may be her best yet. Like the John Ford film it pays homage to, The Searcher is its own kind of masterpiece.
... French manages to portray the attitudes and prejudices of Cal’s maleness without judgment, while ultimately also demonstrating the necessity of his acceptance of the limits of his moral code and his distance from the violence, both natural and social, that predates his entrance into what he had thought would be his retreat from urban strife ... The Searcher blends qualities of French’s best novels ... French expands that closeness and cruelty from a family to a community, and in so doing tells a tale that blends the history and the contemporary reality of a relentlessly palpable village crossroads.
The Searcher is a departure for French in all kinds of ways—the third-person narrator, the American protagonist, the rural West of Ireland setting, the abandonment of her beloved Dublin Murder Squad. But in other ways the book is classic French. It has her keen eye for character, her excellent ear for dialogue and, above all, her narrative control, as she winds the tale tighter and tighter, upping the tension higher and higher. The character of Trey is endearing, a near-feral kid who comes from poverty and trauma, like so many of the children in French’s books ... as much about solving a crime as it is about the near-impossibility of breaking into an insular society with a history, traditions and memories that go back hundreds of years ... In French’s hands, the unspoken affiliations and ancient grudges become borderline terrifying, even for an old Chicago cop.
... meanders its way into a mystery with a deliberate patience ... It’s this nuance, a signature of French’s writing, that makes this novel more than just a mystery; it’s also an exploration of rural poverty and the closely intertwined lives of people who are just trying to scratch out a living ... What sets The Searcher apart from French’s earlier novels is its depiction of how deeply intertwined the residents of the village are—with young people leaving the area, farms struggling and poverty and drug use plaguing the area, each person is somehow dependent on his or her neighbors for survival. This is not a place where Cal can bury his head in the sand. Evocative and lyrical, The Searcher is a mystery worth reading slowly to savor every perfectly rendered detail.
French spends the opening chapters of The Searcher, her eighth book, skillfully fashioning her complex characters and vividly portraying the harsh beauty of the landscape ... there’s less suspense in The Searcher than in French’s earlier novels. However, readers who share her interest in exploring the lives of flawed and compelling characters will find much to love here, including prose as vivid and poetic as you are likely to find anywhere.
Cal’s experiences investigating Brendan’s disappearance will challenge him, but in ways that don’t shift him fundamentally, as French’s plots usually do. Surely that’s because history has caught up with French this time around, instead of vice versa. The bits of The Searcher that address race and the cops back in the U.S. feel a bit tacked on. More importantly, how can Cal have a crisis of faith in the morality of his old job when that faith and the purpose it once brought to his life have already been lost before he arrives in Ardnakelty? Yet French’s hero could not be the decent, dependable man of action that she clearly intends him to be if he weren’t deeply skeptical about the ethics of urban policing after his years in Chicago ... The Searcher is one of only two French novels that isn’t narrated in the first person. (The other, The Secret Place, is, after The Searcher, her least effective book.) This reflects Cal’s relative lack of a complex, conflicted inner life ... what’s been most spellbinding in French’s novels is the quest to obtain truth through the imperfect vehicle of the human psyche and the way that her detectives stare so long into the mystery that they find the mystery staring back into them. Cal comes away from his investigation with his sense of himself more or less intact. That makes him the kind of hero it’s all too easy to find somewhere else.
... compelling but uneven ... an unexpected argument for the power of restorative justice ... French is deeply invested in the aching, wistful beauty of rural Ireland ... As larger themes go, this is all good, meaty stuff. But The Searcher is not the richest of French’s novels, perhaps because it is so invested in its political themes and its setting that it never quite develops its central characters as carefully as French has in her other books. The central cast here is likable but rarely surprising, and there’s a touch of the generic to charming, smarter-than-he-looks, good-ol’-boy Cal. At times, he reads as though French carbon-copied Frank Mackey, the protagonist of 2010’s Faithful Place, and then changed his accent ... But that generic quality is one of the risks inherent to what French is doing with The Searcher. She’s going back to that hoariest of old stories, the righteous and honorable police officer trying to help a child, and she is trying to get the righteous police officer to question the entire genre in which he exists. Cal feels generic because he is: He’s a symbol of his genre ... What French is doing in The Searcher is trying to build a value system that cares about social workers into a novel that can still offer us the cathartic pleasure of watching a clever detective solve a case — while also maintaining her trademark complexity of character and theme ... doesn’t quite pull off every element of this balancing act. But it’s fascinating to watch French try.
Tana French’s much-loved Dublin Murder Squad series is one of the outstanding achievements in contemporary crime fiction ... there is nature writing here of extraordinary beauty – but it means the turbulent energy that usually pulses through a French novel is subdued, the suspense not quite as compelling. The plot is scant and the storytelling leisurely: almost nothing at all happens for the first 100 pages, and only in the final third do sparks begin to fly ... The Searcher is never less than an absorbing read – French is incapable of writing a graceless sentence – but now that she has had her rural sojourn, I do hope she will return to the tumultuous streets of the city that sustains her finest work: Dublin.
French again displays impressive versatility ... French skillfully builds suspense, as the search reveals great turmoil beneath the village’s bucolic facade. This is a fine thriller, but it’s also a moving story of an unlikely friendship that grows from refinishing a ramshackle desk to rebuilding two nearly broken lives. Trey evokes both the vulnerability and inner strength of Ree Dolly in Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a country noir that, like The Searcher, finds tenderness in the troubled hearts of its recalcitrant characters.
It’s a bold move to publish a novel with an American cop hero in October 2020, but if anyone can get away with it, it might be Irish crime phenom Tana French ... [her work] is as consistently thoughtful and thought-provoking as it is entertaining ... Cal happens to be quite reliable, and while he spends much of the novel feeling disturbed and unsettled, the story progresses, if not predictably then on solid, familiar ground. Even so, French finds interesting angles and dynamics, and her cast is, as always, wonderfully drawn.
Rather than relying on shocking-yet-typical twists and dramatic outbursts, French's books rest on beautiful writing, vivid descriptions of Irish scenery, and incomparable storytelling ... The Searcher is far more than your average mystery novel. It has everything you love–the suspense, the questions, the unraveling of lies–without bureaucracy, clichés, or the moral high ground. This book draws you in with images of an idyllic town with friendly neighbors, but by the end you're left with an understanding that nothing is what it seems—even the characters you trusted implicitly are hiding something dark. If that's not enough to convince you to read it, here's something else: I finished it in 8 hours straight. That's how obsessively fascinating this book is.
French’s preferred setting has long been the bustling streets of Ireland’s capital and its suburbs, but with The Searcher , she moves deep into the countryside, where the hills and valleys of the rural west prove just as menacing ... French has great fun referencing the westerns of Johns Ford and Huston, big, brawling American men who were proud of their Irish roots. And inevitably, before long, Cal finds himself caught up in a missing person case ... As the story unfolds, French spins a tale of long-buried secrets, outside forces threatening an insular community and get-rich-quick schemes ... It is a clever plot that remains tense throughout. Yet the real pleasure in reading The Searcher comes not from the mystery of Brendan’s disappearance but from how precisely French captures every aspect of rural Irish life, from the local shop owner who knows every move made by every villager and is desperate to pair Cal off with her sister to the complex grudges buried in the mists of time ... It is a beautifully written, deeply rewarding Irish country noir which springs so vividly from the page that you feel you are there.
French is deploying a well-worn trope here—in fact, she’s deploying a few ... Cal is a complex enough character, though, and it turns out that the mystery he’s trying to solve is less shocking than what he ultimately discovers. French's latest is neither fast-paced nor action-packed, and it has as much to do with Cal’s inner life as it does with finding Brendan. Much of what mystery readers are looking for in terms of action is squeezed into the last third of the novel, and the morally ambiguous ending may be unsatisfying for some. But French’s fans have surely come to expect imperfect allegiance to genre conventions, and the author does, ultimately, deliver plenty of twists, shocking revelations, and truly chilling moments. Slow moving and richly layered.
The setting and surroundings within The Searcher add to the enjoyment of the novel. Ardnakelty is almost a character itself as it is always present but changing. The isolated rural town adds to the slow-growing tension and gives off a good atmosphere. At times, it was almost a cosy reading experience because of the plentiful descriptions of the weather, animals, and the food ... Although the slow start is not a negative, I would have liked to see an increase in pacing after the halfway point, because slow burners are not for everyone ... I’d have liked a fuller conclusion for an ending, but I appreciate different readers are going to want different things. It would have been more engaging to have a bit more drama, or a twist in the plot of the mystery, but on the other hand, too much drama would have been out of place with the setting of the novel. I think this is one of those stories and endings that will divide opinions!
French’s novels frequently consider questions of identity, and what happens to characters when their sense of self is tested to breaking point. The Searcher is her first book not to be set in Dublin, and though she relishes the spare beauty of the landscape, her interest is in the relationship between the land and the people who spend their lives working it ... If French’s popular ‘Dublin Murder Squad’ novels unfold like a long-form television series with multiple subplots and red herrings, The Searcher is appropriately cinematic, with the neat economy and momentum of a classic feature film. Like John Ford’s near namesake, it asks questions about moral codes, and the price to be paid for enacting justice outside the law. There’s a residual snobbery, particularly when it comes to literary awards, that still sees crime fiction and literary novels as mutually exclusive. French has bridged that false divide from the beginning of her career, and The Searcher might just be the book that sees her properly recognised as one of our finest contemporary novelists, of any genre.
The latest Irish mystery by Tana French, The Searcher, is a character-driven slow burner ... Though we follow a retired cop from Chicago called Cal Hooper, the true protagonist of the tale is the small town. It's mentality, the way that the people have friendships and enmities that go back generations and the way they respond to Cal's moving in all show a personality in itself ... the pace of this book is slow, the story really beginning after 100 pages and the plot unfolding mostly in the last quarter of the book. But the writing is a pleasure to read and the characters are varied and keep the book interesting. It's a good mystery for people who read for the writing and don't mind the plot being slow.
... [a] superb standalone ... The more Hooper digs, the more he finds that his new community conceals dark secrets. Insightful characterizations, even of minor figures, and a devastating reveal help make this a standout. Crime fiction fans won’t want to miss this one.
In many ways, French’s The Searcher echoes John Ford’s narrative of a moral man faced with an immoral dilemma ... French is in a class of her own, though, even with her Dublin Murder Squad series. She writes literary novels, brimming with psychological nuance and cultural undertone. Her books typically offer more subtle details about the idiosyncrasies of Irish life than they do about solving murders, and that’s what makes her mystery novels sui generis ... it is straightforward in its affectionate descriptions of the Irish countryside and unblinking in its depiction of the Irish character ... it’s always a compelling and rewarding journey.
