I’ve mentioned before Tana French’s unusual approach to the series of crime novels. Each of her first six books centres on a different member of the fictional Dublin Murder Squad: she didn’t think she could credibly put the same central character through the wringer every two or three years. Her seventh, The Wych Elm, was a standalone novel. The two most recent, The Searcher (2020) and The Hunter (2023) look like the first two-thirds of a new trilogy.

The Searcher features Cal Hooper, a retired American who has bought a house to fix up, on ten acres of land in the west of Ireland. Surprisingly for someone in that situation, Hooper doesn’t have Irish ancestry: he has bought the house because it’s somewhere he could afford, in a setting that seems both peaceful and congenial. He spent 25 years in the Chicago Police Department, most recently as a detective.

He is asked for help by a local 13-year-old, Trey, whose older brother, Brendan, suddenly disappeared six months earlier. Trey has a buzz-cut hairstyle and wears ill fitting jeans and hoodies, so it isn’t till two-thirds of the way through the book that Hooper cottons on that she’s a girl, not a boy. It’s a third-person narrative but told from Hooper’s close point of view, so that Trey is referred to with masculine pronouns up to the point where Hooper is told of his mistake; and the vocabulary is his: “cookies” rather than “biscuits”, “mama” instead of “mammy” etc, except where direct speech is being reported.

Hooper (reluctantly, of course) agrees to try to find out what happened to Brendan and to tell Trey what he discovers. He tells her that there are things he’d have been able to do as a detective in Chicago that won’t be open to him as a retired foreigner in Ireland. He can’t check Brendan’s phone records or find out whether (and, if so, where) his bank card has been used. He’ll have to go around to Brendan’s friends and associates and speak to them himself.

He learns that Brendan (who had apparently seen more Breaking Bad than was healthy, but presumably hadn’t watched right to the end) had been setting up a methamphetamine “lab” in a remote deserted farmhouse up in the mountains. He intended to supply his product to the Dublin gang who control the drug trade in the area. The gang provided him with some equipment and raw material but a group of local farmers found out what he was up to and stole the contents of his “lab”, leaving him in debt to the gang, so that he had to borrow money to restock. Hooper assumes that the drug gang is responsible for Brendan’s disappearance.

In the meantime, the locals have noticed that Hooper is asking questions about things best left hidden. He’s invited to the pub, where he’s introduced to a strong but smooth-tasting poteen. The next day, less hungover than he’d have expected, he’s in no doubt that he’s been given a warning — riddling and cryptic but very serious: he has been asking too many questions. Not willing to renege on his promise to Trey, Hooper continues his enquiries, but with more circumspection.

The warning about asking too many questions and the information about Trey’s femininity were both delivered to Hooper by his neighbour, Mart Lavin. Mart is a 60-year-old bachelor sheep-farmer, who lives alone following the deaths of his mother and brother. He is partly self-educated, having read deeply in such subjects as geology and the Ottoman Empire (The Hunter, p. 84). He has an apparently jocular relationship with Hooper, whom he enjoys teasing. He devours Mikado biscuirs, which Hooper buys for him in the nearby town: the local shopkeeper, Noreen, refuses to stock them for him because (so Mart says at any rate) of a dispute between their families in previous generations. Noreen wants to set Hooper up with her widowed sister, Lena; this is one of the things that Mart teases Hooper about. It’s clear that neither Noreen nor Lena likes Mart.

Trey and Hooper both sustain painful beatings, intended to deter them from investigating further. As well as being painful, the beatings are calculated to look serious, without causing long-term injury. Trey suffers a couple of cracked ribs, a black eye and an injury to her hand that looks at first as if it might include some broken bones. This beating is administered by her mother, who has been threatened that, if she doesn’t carry it out, “they” will. The injury to her hand was caused by the heavy buckle of a belt which her mother used. Hooper is set upon by three young men who throw a covering over his head and lay into him with hurley sticks, breaking his nose, fracturing his collarbone and injuring his knee, making it difficult for him to walk for a few days. Like Trey’s ribs, his fractured collarbone will heal without needing to be set.

(What follows will be even more spoilerish than usual because I can’t say what I’d like to about the second book without describing how the plot of the first is resolved.)

Thinking that the drug gang is behind the beatings, Hooper tries unsuccessfully to contact them to negotiate an understanding of some sort. He accidentally discovers that the beatings were ordered by his good-humoured friend and neighbour, Mart, who is also behind Brendan’s disappearance. Hooper was already getting a bit suspicious of “Mart’s quirky-yokel shtick” (The Searcher, p. 320), but is blindsided by the revelation that Mart is the person he wanted to kill when he saw what had been done to Trey.

“Well,” Cal says, after a long while. “Don’t I feel like the idiot.” (p. 350)

Mart tells Hooper that Brendan’s death was “an accident”. He and some of the local farmers had confronted Trey’s brother in the abandoned house that he had been going to use as a meth lab.

“We were intending to explain the situation to him, was all,” Mart says. He nods at Cal’s beat-up face. “You know the way yourself, sure. Just a bitta clarification. Only this lad didn’t want anything clarified …” (The Searcher, p. 354)

In other words, they had been going to administer another one of their trade-mark beatings: painful and serious-looking but not severe enough to require a trip to the hospital. Unfortunately Brendan fought back and ended up banging his head against a propane tank. So his “accidental” death was at least manslaughter and might be considered murder, since an intention to cause serious injury is enough to ground a murder conviction. Mart and his crew buried him in the bog on the other side of the mountain.

Hooper reaches agreement with Mart: he will tell Trey what happened to her brother, stressing the “accident” story and without naming names, on condition that she promises not to take any further action about it. If Mart will lead him to the grave, he will recover Brendan’s watch, to prove to her the truth of his story. He will then also be able to assure her that he has seen the body for himself.

The upshot is that Hooper finds himself living next door to a man who ordered not only his own beating but that of a 13-year-old girl, and who forced the girl’s mother to carry it out. Finding himself tempted to make a joke about Mart’s headgear, “he remembers they’re no longer on those terms. It catches him with a twist of loneliness. He liked Mart” (The Searcher, p. 374).

The events of The Hunter take place two years later. Hooper is now in a relationship with Lena. He has taught Trey some carpentry and she and he make some money by making and repairing furniture. Trey comes to work at his house most days and usually has her lunch there. Again, it’s a third-person narrative but now for much of the time the close point of view is Trey’s (though we still visit Hooper’s, particularly in episodes where Trey isn’t present). Trey and Hooper both have dogs who came from the litter of one of Lena’s. The stability of this idyll is threatened when Trey’s father, Johnny Reddy, comes back unexpectedly after four years in London. Johnny is accompanied by an Englishman, and is claiming that there is gold to be found at the base of the mountains around their townland.

Johnny leads the local farmers to believe that he’s running a scam on the Englishman, who is calling himself Cillian Rushborough. In fact, Rushborough is a dangerous criminal to whom Johnny owes a lot of money that he can’t pay, and the two of them are planning to scam Johnny’s neighbours. Hooper worries that this will make Trey a pariah in the townland, particularly as she seems to be helping her father. The problem of what to do about Johnny leads to an uneasy rapprochement between Hooper and Mart.

Another thing he doesn’t like is the sense of alliance with Mart that’s somehow been thrust on him. He had the boundary between the two of them carefully and clearly mapped out, and it held firm for two years, although Mart sometimes poked at it just out of devilment. (The Hunter, 176)

Then, Rushborough is murdered and his body left on the road near the Reddy house. Trey, accompanied by her dog, Banjo, is the first person to find it.

Trey gives the police an accurate account of her finding the body, but prefaces it with made-up details tending to throw suspicion on men from the townland. Hooper can see what she’s doing, but doesn’t feel he can intervene.

She gave Cal her word never to do anything about Brendan but all this is just distant enough from Brendan that she can convince herself it doesn’t count. She saw clearly that she would never get a chance like this again, so she took it. (The Hunter, p. 263)

Hooper is both worried and appalled by Trey’s embroidery of her statement to the detective investigating Rushborough’s murder but he can’t see what he can do about it. He doesn’t seem to recognize that he hasn’t quite kept his promise to her either, first telling her that Brendan had been scared off, then relaying Mart’s account of an accidental killing, though by now he is well aware of how Mart operates.

The detective, Nealon, has not of course made it known where his information is coming from but Mart realizes that it must be from Trey, and so takes the highly uncharacteristic step of calling to see Lena who, as I’ve already mentioned, does not get on with him.

Lena, who has been called cold plenty of times and acknowledges some truth in that, recognises it when she sees it: under all the chat and the mischief, which are real enough, Mart is cold as stone. (The Hunter, pp. 287–8)

Unlike her sister, Lena has always held herself aloof from the townland’s messy business. As a young woman she had been about to get away, to study veterinary science in Scotland, but she equally wanted to marry Sean Dunne, who was going to inherit the family farm and wasn’t prepared to leave Ardnakelty on any conditions. After Sean died, Lena sold most of the land, to the chagrin of his siblings. She stayed on in the townland but continued not to get involved. When Trey asked her if she knew who was responsible for the attack on Brendan, Lena said she could guess, but insisted that she wasn’t going to. (Lena and Trey’s mother, Sheila, were childhood friends and Trey has been welcome to stay in Lena’s house when she needed to take refuge somewhere other than at home, such as after Johnny’s return.)

Recognizing that the trouble that Trey has been stirring up for the local men will reflect badly on the American, who is regarded as the teenager’s de facto parent, Lena has unilaterally announced that she and Hooper are engaged to be married. She has often said that she has no intention of ever marrying again and that remains the case, but she is hoping that being “spoken for” by a local woman will prevent Hooper’s being seen as a blow-in or interloper. Mart tells her that her protection won’t be enough. If Trey won’t withdraw the part of her statement that implicates local men, various locals with drop hints and remarks that will leave Cal Hooper looking like the obvious suspect in Rushborough’s killing. If Detective Nealon can’t make a case against Hooper, he’ll go after the one person who was unquestionably, admittedly on the mountain road that morning. In that case, Hooper can be expected to confess to save Trey. Lena knows that better than anybody.

The differences between Cal’s point of view and Trey’s are interesting. Cal tends to notice physical details, including the scenery, as here:

The sky is clear and the moon is big enough to keep him on the road with no need for his flashlight, although once or twice when the tree shadows crowd in he gets addled and feels one foot sink into the deep grass of the verge. He keeps an eye out for whatever crossed in front of the car, but it’s either gone or turned cautious. The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocket knife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. (The Searcher, p. 42)

Contrast that with Trey’s perceptions:

Trey takes it for granted that there are unseen things on the mountain. The assumption has been with her from as far back as she can remember, so the edge of fear that comes with it is a stable, accepted presence …

Trey has seen none of them, but when she is on the mountain at night, she feels them there. The sensation has changed in the last year or two. When she was younger she felt herself glanced over and dismissed, too slight to be worth any time or focus, just another small animal going about its business. Now her mind is a denser, more intricate thing. She feels herself being noted. (The Hunter, p. 147)

The story reaches its climax with a roaring fire on the drought-parched mountain. Trey has set light to the shed behind their house, believing that it contains evidence which, unless it is destroyed, would identify Rushborough’s killer, an eventuality she’d rather avoid. The fire rapidly spreads to the house and then to the trees and gorse around.

Trey runs. As she jumps for the top of the wall, something sounds in the recesses between the stones, a hollow scrape like bone along rock. Trey, startled off balance, misses her footing. She comes down hard and feels her foot bend inwards underneath her. When she tries to stand up, her ankle won’t take her weight. (The Hunter, p. 385)

It may be that the mountain’s “things” may no longer be content merely to note Trey’s existence, still less to glance over her.

I see that a new novel by Tana French is due for publication this year. The title, The Keeper, suggests that it’s a third book in this series. I’ll be quite surprised if it isn’t largely (or at least partly) told from Lena’s point of view, but time will tell.

Editions: The Searcher, Penguin paperback, 2021;
The Hunter, Penguin paperback, 2025, ellipsis added.