The sequel to The Searcher: It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey's long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn't want protecting. What she wants is revenge.
Suspense is in the details — small details — scattered throughout ... The extraordinary sequel to ... A singularly tense and moody thriller, but it’s also an exceptional novel because of its structure.
As a pair, the Cal Hooper novels paint a rich portrait of a time and place. But this is the rare Tana French novel where I do think it’s necessary to have read the predecessor, despite a fair amount of painstaking exposition. And while some of this pacing feels deliberate...at times it lags ... French’s dialogue is some of the best in the business, and it’s a delight to watch her move between American and Irish vernacular. In general, the novel’s greatest pleasures — genuine twists aside — reside in the specific intersection of outsider and native ... French does more than show the banal evil behind a smiling face. She makes it particular as a kicked dog’s limp and dying embers in a steel barrel — and reminds us that we underestimate such places at our peril.
Without a protagonist who is invested in bare-knuckling it through the unscrupulous world of policing, her stories’ brilliantly rough edges have been shaved right down. Her detectives were our Charons, guiding us through hell; her new plots are set in an annoyingly amoral limbo ... This time, French pushes her plot into an even lumpier shape ... A body doesn’t appear until almost 300 pages deep (in a 450-ish-page novel) ... She’s shaken off far too many of the vital elements that make her novels boil and steam. This sort of fiction needs characters with passion, curiosity, and doggedness—she’s dispensed with all three.
