BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: The Hunter (Tana French, author)
Crime fiction, Ireland, small town, fraud, family secrets, murder, teenage angst, family where you find it, prickly female protagonist.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: The Hunter (Tana French, author)
A slow-burn crime story set in the Irish countryside, Tana French’s novel, The Hunter, marinates themes of family, fraud, revenge, loyalty and honesty to create a deliciously satisfying story. Trey Reddy is a lone-wolf of an aggrieved teenage girl, who roams the Irish mountain countryside near her modest home in search of her missing older brother’s grave. She simmers with resentment of the small and controlling community in which she lives, and dreams of avenging her brother’s disappearance and presumed death. Her father, Johnny, has abandoned his family in pursuit of a life of crime in London. Trey’s mother struggles as a single parent. Neither Trey nor her mother is pleased when Johnny slithers back into town.
In her father’s absence, Trey has bonded with ex-policeman and U.S. transplant, Cal Hooper. A divorcee who relocated to Ireland in early retirement, Cal is a skilled carpenter and woodworker and imparts his skills to Trey. Together they repair and build furniture for people across their community, creating an income stream for Trey and her family. Cal’s love interest and companion, Lena, a local widow, is a fellow independent spirit with a similar affinity for young Trey.
Johnny waltzes into town with a nefarious scheme under his belt. Johnny weaves a tale that his new-found friend, Londoner, Cillian Rushborough, is the long-lost relative of a local woman who comes in search of gold purportedly buried on the local farms. Johnny enlists investments from hard-working local farmers and schemes to separate them from more of their wealth. Suddenly Cillian turns up dead on the mountain road behind Trey’s house. Trey discovers the body and becomes a pivotal witness. Her safety is threatened by her recollection of events, for which there is no corroborating story.
The story gallops forward as a police investigator from Dublin arrives to investigate the murder. Competing forces maneuver to place different suspects in the detective’s line of sight. Lies and fabrications threaten to obscure the search for truth and justice. Johnny’s criminal enterprise begins to unravel with Cillian’s death. Cal and Lena join forces to protect Trey. Ingenious plot twists drive the story forward and loyalty in its high and low forms rise to the forefront.
The value and pleasure of reading The Hunter outweighs this reviewer’s urge to spoil the ride. The Hunter is atypical, fresh and lyrical crime fiction. French embeds crimes deeply in the infrastructure of a small community. She turns right and wrong on their heads at times, and blurs the lines between good and evil. She allows the complexity of everyday lives and decisions to rise and make her characters supremely human. Her ability to capture the eccentricity of a small Irish town, the musicality of its dialect, the natural beauty of its flora and fauna, the power of its secrets and the binding nature of its relationships is stunning. French’s writing feels rich and special, and yet understated.
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