Tana French featured on my Best of 2020 post with Broken Harbour, and I could easily have included any one of her other novels, most of which I read last year too. And if there'd been a category for 'Most anticipated books of the year', The Searcher would have been high on the list. However, I would have needed another category too: 'Biggest disappointment of the year'. Actually I only finished The Searcher a few days ago, but I'd been listening to my Audible version for what seemed like months. Admittedly this was partly because I kept going to sleep and having to back track (thank goodness for the timer), but it seemed like a really long novel anyway and I was longing for the end. Or, more accurately, I was longing for something to happen.
It's only now I've had a few days to mull it over that I've realised the problem was that I was expecting quite a different kind of novel. I was misled by the publicity and reviews , which kept calling it a thriller. Frankly, a thriller it is not. Does that make it a bad book? Not at all. Tana French writes beautifully, and the novel is wonderfully evocative of a area of rural Ireland and the people who inhabit it. And among those people are the narrator, Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective seeking peace and recovery from a broken marriage, and thirteen-year-old Trey Reddy, child of a large and dysfunctional family, whose adored older brother has gone missing - perhaps Cal can solve the mystery?
So - yes, in the end he does, and maybe in doing so brings some closure to the damaged Reddy family. The investigation has been slow, as Cal is hampered by not having any of the resources he was accustomed to in the US. In the process he discovers that this sleepy village is not at all what it seems: there are many secrets and a very dark side which makes the detective aware that you don't have to be in a big city to get into some very deep and dangerous water. People he has liked and trusted show unexpected and disturbing sides, though he also gets much support from some unexpected places. It's a slow burn, and it's no good waiting for it to suddenly become tense and exciting, because that's not the sort of novel it is. Having only realised that in retrospect, I now have a different view altogether.
What will stay with me most is the beautifully observed relationship between Cal and Trey. Both are damaged and suffering in their different ways, and though Cal is worried about having a troubled teenager dependent on him, he comes to realise by the end that he can do some good to an otherwise challenging life, and the future, if not bright, is looking more hopeful for both of them.
This is not the first time Tana French has broken away from her well-established police procedurals - the first of her novels I read was her 2019 The Wych Elm, also a standalone and a brilliant book which I reviewed here. I really admire her for taking another leap into unfamiliar territory, and I'll be looking out with interest for whatever she does next.
