Like The Witch-Elm, this book feels like Tana French is taking the (very successful but still present) formula of the Dublin Murder Squad books and twisting and playing with it, and the results with both this novel and the previous one, is a more subtle and literary effort. If Witch-Elm is what the Murder Squad books are like from a suspect’s point of view, this book moves out from the first-person perspective to a very close third person, and the effect of this change is that we feel as outside to the inner-workings of all the other characters as the main character does.
Cal is a retired cop from the US who has bought a piece of land in Ireland. Two things start happening about the same time: a sheep shows up dead and mutilated and one of his windows is broken by a vandal. He starts asking around about both and in his budding friendship with a much older retired police office Mark, he starts to look into both a little. In the meantime, Trey, a waifish boy starts showing up around the edges of Cal’s property and after slowly developing a small amount of trust with him, Cal finds out that Trey’s older brother has been missing for a few months and Trey wants help finding him. Without the resources of being a police officer and not wanting to press too hard on the delicate relationship he has with his new, but still standoffish town, Cal begins looking into the disappearance.
Like other good literary mysteries, this one is a slow burn based almost entirely on character development and slowly shifting moments of meaning. The writing is good, the pacing is slow, but purposeful, and the novel holds together in much more subtle ways from the murder squad books.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52661162-the-searcher)