Tana French made a name for herself as a masterful crime novelist with her Dublin Murder Squad series. The Searcher, a standalone mystery featuring a retired American cop caught up in a missing persons case in the Irish countryside, further cements that reputation.
After 25 years as a Chicago cop, disillusioned and recently divorced Cal Hooper buys a fixer-upper in rural western Ireland to get away and reset his life. In his new town, he keeps a low profile, but despite not talking about his past, his reputation as a one-time cop--and stranger in a small town--precedes him. When a local kid asks for help finding a missing brother, Cal's quickly caught up in the case, swept up by currents of village life, full of secrets and hidden dangers and thinly veiled threats.
As Cal gets drawn further and further into this missing persons case, despite being "short his gun and his badge," he starts "to get an inkling of how tangled up things get, around here, and how carefully you have to watch where you put your feet." French uses this backdrop of a small rural town to great effect, drawing out a setting that is as crucial to locating the missing boy as any character here. Though this can make The Searcher feel slow at times, readers who allow themselves to sink into the atmosphere French creates with skill and precision will delight in this suspenseful mystery packed with psychological intrigue. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm