The Hunter

By Tana French

Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

In the hardscrabble Irish hill town of Ardnakelty, fifteen-year-old Trey Reedy lugs a broken chair on her back across a mountain. She repairs furniture with retired American detective, Cal Hooper. The unlikely pair forged a fierce emotional bond in Tana French’s spectacular work of Irish noir, The Searcher (2020), and in the three years that follow, Trey transforms from near-feral forest child to competent student and capable carpenter. Regrettably, no amount of mending furniture, or herself, allows Trey to shed her disreputable Reedy family name. It carries a burden the weight of Atlas’ boulder, but it’s one Cal helps shoulder. Trey stops home for lunch and, “sitting smack in the middle of the sofa, leaning back and grinning, with arms spread wide,” rests her smarmy, reprobate father, Johnny Reedy. The small amount of hopefulness she allowed into her life plummets from the sky.

So begins The Hunter, a lush, quietly powerful, and deeply atmospheric sequel to The Searcher. Cal is still considered a “blow-in” by neighbors. He wants little more than to fish in nearby rivers, restore furniture, and gaze at the rooks soaring the treetops in the yard of the home he refurbished. Cal despises Johnny Reedy by reputation and loathes the thought of him causing Trey distress. French captures Cal’s reaction in soulful staccato:

Cal wishes, with a surge of something that feels like vast dawning grief, that Johnny had waited even one more year, till Cal had just a little more time to shore up the kid’s cracked places, before he came prancing into town, breaking things.

Ardnakelty, fraught in a never-ending severe summer, agonizes in blistering heat. Residents are “fed up to their back teeth” with scorching temperatures and collective anxiety intensifies as crops and livestock suffer. The unthinkable, farmers being forced to sell land held in the same families for generations appears likely. But no worry, Johnny Reedy has come home with plans to rescue the town.

While in London, avoiding any semblance of responsibility, Johnny befriended British millionaire Cillian Rushborough. Rushborough claims a distant familial relation to Ardnakelty and alleges as a boy he heard stories of gold washed down into these very foothills. The “plastic paddy” declares he knows where to search, and not surprisingly, the townsfolk are highly skeptical. Johnny proposes to landowners that they plant bits of gold where Rushborough will pan for samples. Then, at minimum, each farmer earns a few thousand pounds for the right to search on their land, and, who knows, perhaps the British fellow even locates a mother lode. The chance at riches is a powerful narcotic to desperate men trying to survive an unforgiving summer. Johnny understands and uses this.

Trey cares nothing for her father’s words and desperately wants him gone. She hides away and records the men salting the river with bits of gold, the setting described in French’s textured prose:

In the dark before the dawn, the men don’t look like men. They’re only snatches of disturbance at the edges of Trey’s senses: smudges of thicker shadow shifting on the riverbank, flickers of muttering through the rush and gabble of water, which is raucous in its silence. The stars are faint enough that the surface of the river barely shimmers; the moon is a bare cold spot low on the horizon giving no more light.

Trey hustles to Rushborough expecting crushing embarrassment and immediate banishment of her father. Instead, she elevates herself on the danger spectrum, earns a gash in the face, her dog’s paw is crushed by a bootheel, and a villain emerges. Little makes a character more quickly and universally hated than violence toward children and animals.

Mystery remains into the final chapters of The Hunter, but French weaves such a captivating web that readers might turn pages to observe the elegant reverberation at each newly plucked thread. Trey, Cal, and others in Ardnakelty take great pains to maintain peace and stability, and in a land largely self-policed, they employ extreme measures to preserve it.

Tana French settled in Ireland more than thirty years ago and steadily garnered fans and awards for her smartly drawn Dublin Murder Squad police procedurals. Devotees of these books express mixed feelings about the novels set in fictional Ardnakelty. They’re paced slower, more heavily character-driven, but no tension is lost. Even in quiet scenes of domestic calm, the background crackles with friction, real or imagined.

A comparison between French’s writing and another Irish titan crafting literary crime fiction, John Banville, can easily be made. Banville’s (also published as Benjamin Black) brilliant Quirke series relies on sparse dialogue and gorgeous descriptions of weather and landscape, using vivid, lyrical prose. For a country of only five million, The Hunter reminds us that their writers (and characters) still reliably punch above their weight.

Ryan Davison is a scientist and writer currently working in Lisbon