Tana French’s 2020 novel, The Searcher, was an old-fashioned western transported to a contemporary rural townland in the west of Ireland, a place with its own definition of justice, where feuds and obligations go back generations and outsiders are regarded at best with suspicion. The Hunter – her ninth novel – is its sequel, building on the same complex relationships and moral ambiguities that gave its predecessor such rich texture.
At the heart of the story is the original outsider, retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper, who was left at the end of The Searcher making an uneasy compromise between his professional understanding of right and wrong, and what that might mean in a place such as Ardnakelty. His choices in that book were shaped by a paternal desire to protect a lost and wayward adolescent, Trey Reddy.
