When Chicago cop Cal Hooper retires to the village of Ardnakelty in a remote corner of western Ireland, he’s expecting to find peace and quiet. Instead, he finds himself tangled up in a pair of brutal murders that revolve around young Trey Reddy, a girl from a family who live on the edge of the village both geographically and socially, and navigating a culture as alien as the UFOs his neighbor Bobby seeks in the isolated boglands.
These are the second and third books by Tana French that I’ve read; the first was In the Woods, an unsettling and inconclusive police procedural that reminded me a bit of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge, so I knew not to expect tidy endings and neatly wrapped solutions where justice is served and order restored. Indeed, there’s no order to restore in Ardnakelty, or at least not the sort of order that you’d find in a quaint Agatha Christie village: the allegiances and motives of the village’s residents seem as changeable as the weather, but also as constant as the mountains. Hooper has a background in the mountains of North Carolina, so he’s not completely unprepared for the dangers that lurk under the surface of Ardnakelty’s charms, but he’s still very much a foreigner who sometimes stumbles into traps that the locals know to avoid, and often mistakes cunning for wit and generosity for warning.
The mystery in The Searcher, the first book in the series, isn’t terribly mysterious: Trey’s older brother Brendan has gone missing, and it seems that the people of Ardnakelty know more about what’s happened to him than they’re willing to let on. Cal is pulled in to the investigation reluctantly: while he has some experience with working missing persons cases in Chicago, he doesn’t know where to begin in Ardnakelty, and he quickly puts himself at risk with blunders and misunderstandings. Brendan’s fate is sad and prosaic, but no less affecting for its tawdriness.
The Hunter starts off as a caper story: Trey’s father returns from London with an Englishman who wants to search for a vein of gold his grandmother claimed lay beneath the crags and fields of the mountains, and recruits the village in a scheme to defraud the Englishman. It quickly becomes clear, though, that the scheming runs in both directions, and what looked like a bit of craic turns deadly.
While these are both superb crime novels, carefully paced and full of tension, what really sets them apart is the cast of characters. Ardnakelty feels very real, and not at all quaint, and its characters crackle with wit, passions, and petty jealousies. I found myself enjoying the banter as much as the plot, along with Cal’s wry commentary on people he is slowly beginning to understand, if only imperfectly. In both stories, what could be run-of-the-mill crimes take on a character only possible in Ardnakelty, and the fuzzy, slippery, imperfect conclusions are appropriate to the setting.
Even before I had finished these books, I put in my pre-order for the next in the series, The Keeper. I’m looking forward to spending more time in this grim and charming village that seems fated to a plague of grisly crimes.