Tana French is our best living crime writer.
Crime fiction, at its best explores the true nature of human beings when at their worst. If there are no atheists in fox holes, there are no angels with guns in their hands. What motivates us to sin? What are the consequences? Why do we commit evil upon our fellow human being?
The best writers use their characters rather than their plots to explore this. Tana French doesn’t create characters as much as introduce their fully-lived selves. Inseparable from their Irish backgrounds and Irish backdrop, they are accessible at face and muddled in motive, shifting from page-to-page in the same way our human consciousness works. She does not demand that they adhere to her plot, she allows them to dictate it.
To me, this is no doubt why she gets the “literary” title. Most of her books take place inside the head of one or two characters. This is quite common amongst crime writers but because French is so keen eyed in her characters perceptions, because she understands them so completely and thoroughly, she makes even the most banal encounters sound fascinating.
And thus, plotting falls into place. The plot for her new book The Hunter is exceedingly simple: the father of a young girl comes home to rural Ireland, along with a street smart Londoner who he is running a scheme with. Cal, a retired Chicago police detective, has been mentoring the girl and is suspicious of her father and his motivations. Action ensues.
The Hunter is a book anyone can write but French writes it best because she never forgets its crime fiction roots: the scheming of the dad and his cohort, the shady motivations of Cal and the townsfolk, the constant state of tension of the daughter…everyone has an angle. Everyone is going to get pulled into doing things they don’t want to do. Irish laws, Irish culture, American perception of criminal justice collide again and again until the book reaches its conclusion.
A return to form after two good-but-not-great-by-her-standard books, The Hunter is up there with her best stuff, supplanting The Trespasser as my number two and checking in just below The Likeness.