The Searcher - Tana French
This was a real slowburner, in the way that it took me three weeks to read, and it is super rare for me to spend that long reading something. But it is a slowburner in a good way, the story builds slowly, and you find yourself immersed in it, part of it, rooting for the characters, even the shadier ones.
Cal Hooper is a retired Chicago PD cop who has moved to a remote village in Ireland where he plans to restore an old cottage that he has bought, hunt for food, and basically not think about his divorce and previous life as a cop. But a young local lad starts hanging around, asking Cal to help him find his brother who has gone missing, and Cal just can’t lay things to rest.
The Searcher is more about character development and stories that will never have the happy ending that we want them to than it is a thriller in my opinion. There are thriller elements (missing person, local secrets, weird happenings, potential drug gangs from Dublin etc), but the book’s main focus is on Cal and his relationship with Trey, and how he finds himself fitting into his new surroundings, without completely losing who he has been all along. I loved the descriptions of the village and the local characters, the secrets everyone hides, and the way Cal fits in to it all. Trey was a heartbreaking character to me, and I wanted to just hug them and take them away from it all, something that the author uses in a great way to give depth to Cal’s character.
While I didn’t rush through this as I have with other Tana French novels, I actually think the story will remain with me for longer, lingering in my mind. I would actually love to see Cal brought back again in a future story (and Mart too).