A glance, a grimace, a tightening of shoulders: Suspense is in the details — small details — scattered throughout Tana French’s new novel, “The Hunter.” These moments pile up until, in the novel’s stunning climax, the veneer of the mundane collapses, revealing the unthinkable that lies beneath.
“The Hunter” is the extraordinary sequel to “The Searcher” (2020), a novel that blindsided some of French’s longtime fans who were accustomed to the action of her Dublin Murder Squad police procedural series. (You need not have read “The Searcher” to appreciate “The Hunter,” though it helps.) Cal Hooper, the quiet hero French introduced in “The Searcher,” is a retired Chicago police detective who bought a derelict cottage in the west of Ireland precisely so he would never again have to chase down criminals or use his service weapon. He longed for what W.B. Yeats called “the peace [that] comes dropping slow” in the Irish countryside. What Cal should have known, however, is that evil doesn’t read the tourist brochures. The only thing that came “dropping slow” in “The Searcher” was Cal’s romantic illusion of rural life in Ireland.
