By Dennis Fischman

In her Dublin Murder Squad books, Tana French did the literary equivalent of lighting a candle from a candle: a minor character in Book 1 would turn up as the central figure of Book 2, and so on. The Somerville Public Library Mystery Book Club liked her writing so much, we unofficially dubbed ourselves the Boston Murder Squad!

Toward the end of the series, French took a new tack, following Detective Antoinette Conway for the last two entries. That was a more conventional approach, but with an unconventional detective, a Black woman in Ireland.

“The Searcher” by Tana French.
Viking, 2020, 562 pages.

The hero of The Searcher, Cal Hooper, is a conventional detective: a white man and former Chicago policeman with the requisite addiction to work, alcohol problem, and troubled marriage (that led to divorce before this story starts). What’s unusual about him is that he has a strong and straightforward moral code. When he could not reconcile it with his job any longer, he resigned from the police and moved. Here he is, trying to work out his confusion by pouring his energy into a run-down cabin in a small Irish village in the hills.

Just when we thought he was out, his good heart pulls him back in.

A teenager, Trey Reddy, starts haunting Hooper’s property, gradually gaining his trust to the point where he takes on the job of finding out what happened to Trey’s older brother Brendan, who has been missing for months. But Hooper has no badge, no uniform, no database, and he is only beginning to know his neighbors and the people in the village, and their intertwined family histories that go back for generations. And they are only beginning to know him.

How can he win enough trust to be told anything? How can he trust that anyone will tell him the truth when there is more at stake than he knows? Most important, when moral decisions arise that can’t easily be resolved by his principles or intuition, how will he decide what’s right?

As usual with this author, the writing is lovely, especially the dialogue, and the character development is enthralling. I will certainly read the next in the series because I want to know what happens next with Cal, Trey, his faraway daughter Alyssa, and his potential love interest, Lena.

The two drawbacks to this book, for me, were that at least one of the killers was obvious from early on, and (more important) that for a mature man with admirable qualities, Cal Hooper is an emotional doofus. He’s beginning to learn better at the close of this book. Let’s see where he goes next.

Dennis Fischman is a member of the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club and an inveterate reader.