Tana French’s third novel in the Cal Hooper series, her tenth if you include her Dublin Murder Squad series, has all the quality and assuredness you might expect of a crime writer at the top of her game. This series began in 2020 with The Searcher, introducing retired American cop, Cal Hooper, who has come to the Irish village of Ardnakelty in search of peace. Three books in, Cal is engaged to local woman Lena and together they have taken the wild schoolgirl, Trey, under their wing.
The Keeper starts at a leisurely pace, as locals chat in the village shop, but a chill of foreboding dilutes the warmth of these pages as Cal notices something off about a young local woman, Rachel, who is in tense conversation with her fiance, Eugene, son of the village big shot, Tommy Moynihan. It’s not long before Rachel is found dead in the river and we spend the next 500 pages piecing together the reasons why.
French is examining many contemporary issues here, including the changing nature of modern Irish life and the undulating power dynamics of small communities trying to maintain the delicate balance between survival and extinction. She’s also examining bigger concepts such as family and community and how they too have adapted.
French’s style is enjoyably reverential to the written word, and even more so to the spoken word. There are some brilliantly Chandleresque lines, such as the description of Eugene’s face as “good-looking as long as you get it at the right angle and don’t have high expectations in the way of chins”. Or this one, describing the local shopkeeper and gossip, Noreen: “she fires out supplies, information, advice and sympathy with the speed and force of a tennis-ball machine”. And then there is the simple joy to be found in French’s sublime employment of the term “sh**ebaggery”.
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The Keeper is not a page-turner in the urgent, modern style, but an immersive read that demands to be savoured. Still, French never forgets she is revealing a mystery and she deftly pulls the rug with an exquisitely shocking late twist.
Everything is satisfactorily if precariously resolved in the end, which allows the reader to hope that Cal Hooper will be back before long.
Edel Coffey, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a journalist and broadcaster. Her latest novel, In Glass Houses, is published by Sphere.
