TANA FRENCH — THE SEARCHER

Image: bog hand

It appears I began these entries some time after blazing through Tana French’s bibliography. From this one could make the mistake that I rarely read mysteries or crime fiction. That’s not really the case. And among contemporary crime authors Tana French captivates me most. There’s a lot of overlap between my feelings for her prose and this rapturous profile in The New Yorker, so I won’t go on at length about why I’m such a big fan. In the years since that was written, she’s moved on from the Dublin Murder novels, first with The Wych Elm and now with The Searcher. The trappings of the police procedural were never predictable in her hands anyway, so I’m not surprised to find her writing crime novels that approach crime from ever more oblique angles. The Searcher tells the story of an ex-cop; “solving the crime” occurs on a moral spectrum outside of that which is dictated by law. This isn’t a vengeance narrative, however. And actually our protagonist is a bit too much of a goody-goody for me to truly count him a kindred spirit, but he’s reliable and interesting, and the plot — which is what I came for — zips and hums. Spoiler alert: it is not a gunfight but a conversation that shows itself to be the climax of the story. This is an assured and satisfying way to end things: the scene thrives in moral nuance without ever feeling polemical; it is surprising and earned.