After eight previous titles, The Hunter is the first time Tana French has kept the protagonist in place for consecutive novels, bringing back Cal, the retired Chicago cop blow-in from 2020′s The Searcher. To good effect, though, he now shares the lead with Lena, a local widow who is cautiously seeing him, and Trey, a resolutely guarded teenage girl who has formed a kind of surrogate family with them. Where French’s Dublin Murder Squad books can be read independently, these two novels are much more enmeshed with each other, particularly because The Searcher left Trey with a bone-deep anger – “too dense and tangled to find a way out of her” – that shapes The Hunter’s plot.
That plot kicks in when Trey’s absentee father Johnny – one of life’s fabricators, always key in French’s work – reappears with a dubious scheme about an English investor looking for gold in the mountains. Johnny’s scheme unleashes waves of hope and resentment that violently unsettle the whole village of Ardnakelty, full as it is of lives “layered with things barely held in check”. While this rural landscape isn’t as insistently Gothic as French’s Dublin, it’s still rich with portents that amplify these spiralling tensions. As the climax looms, Ardnakelty’s fields “should have the dreamy ease of evening, but instead they’re swollen with a strange bruised glow, under a thickening haze of cloud”.
Characters like Faithful Place’s Frank and The Trespasser’s Antoinette have always sparked on French’s pages, navigating the shadowy lines that separate insiders from outsiders, those who belong from those who don’t. Even filtered through third-person narration, that spark persists here in moments like when Trey recognises the “ferocious power” of local gossip, “fluid, slippery, switchbacking, forging twisting channels you can’t predict”. This novel’s rewards have much to do with watching the characters underestimate these treacherous depths until it’s too late, or very nearly so.
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The Hunter takes its time reaching a simmer. When it does, though, it ends with French’s most cinematic set piece, and – thanks to her writing’s deep vein of empathy – with a twist that manages the vanishingly rare trick of being both genuinely surprising and so deeply, movingly grounded in character as to be entirely plausible. It’s an impressive pay-off for the patient reader of this quietly deliberate crime novel by one of Ireland’s most distinctive writers.
