Given the chaotic and scary place we Americans now find ourselves in, perhaps you’ve fantasized about relocating to another country where they speak English with a charming accent and don’t start a war every couple of weeks. Like, say, Ireland? If so, you might want to read one or all three of the books in Tana French’s Cal Hooper series before doing anything rash. Her latest, The Keeper, wraps up the struggle of her hero, a laconic retired American cop, to settle into Ardnakelty, which may be the least welcoming community in Ireland. Potential émigrés, beware.
French is one of our most gifted crime-fiction writers, and in the first two Hooper books, The Searcher and The Hunter, she uses her superb dialogue and characterization skills to take an immersive approach to Cal’s efforts at coexistence with Ardnakelty’s clannish inhabitants. Each passing glance, uncomfortable encounter, and scrap of banter is put under a microscope and studied as a way of understanding the town’s murky social eco-system. French’s level of detail can swamp the narrative at times, but it does have a certain hypnotic power.
