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.
The Hunter opens two years on; under Cal’s guidance Trey, now 15, is on her way to becoming an accomplished carpenter and shaking off her family’s bad name. So when her feckless father, Johnny, waltzes back into town after four years’ absence, with a dodgy Englishman in tow and a bold plan to find gold in the townland, Cal is again caught in tangles of conflicting loyalties and concepts of debt and punishment that have little to do with the law.
French made her name writing literary police procedurals. These two recent novels, though there are murders and mysteries to be solved, are of a different nature: slower, darker and more interior, their world meticulously created through layer upon layer of subtle interactions, where everyone goes at their conversations sideways. Cal’s exchanges with his wily neighbour Mart Lavin, the de facto leader of the local farmers, are still enjoyably comic, but here they are dense with subtext, made treacherous by Cal and Mart’s shared history. French is one of the sharpest observers of dialogue in contemporary fiction, perhaps a legacy of her acting background. The ensemble set pieces – the group scenes in the pub – are choreographed with verve and clarity, and she captures the cadences of local speech without straying into cliche.
She also has fun expanding the wild west theme to include the madness of a gold rush. Johnny’s gold is a multi-directional con, but French evokes the mythic and enduring power of gold to enchant otherwise sensible men: “A solid thing appearing in front of the men’s faces, brazen and undeniable, has a different kind of power, to which they’re unaccustomed and against which they have few defences. She let the gold do its own talking.”
The Hunter is undeniably a slow burner, and this is one of its strengths (as long as the reader is forewarned not to expect a conventional crime novel). French ratchets up the tension in increments, until the reader realises, along with Cal, that the plan has escaped Johnny’s control to a point where every possible outcome must entail terrible damage. By the end, these characters have taken on such solidity that, long after finishing it, I often catch myself wondering how they’re doing – a testament to the author’s mastery of her craft.
The Hunter by Tana French is published by Penguin Viking (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
