The Hunter
by Tana French
Fifteen-year-old Trey Reddy is shocked when her long-absent father, Johnny, unexpectedly returns to the family home in Ardnakelty, a fictional rural community in west Ireland. She doesn’t trust him: he’s a charmer, but has always been a conman and schemer. He abandoned his wife and six children four years ago, leaving them to a hardscrabble poverty, and Trey doesn’t believe he’s reappeared simply to pick up the reins of fatherhood.
Sure enough, Johnny has a scheme. A rich Dubliner, Mr. Rushborough, has arrived with a tale from his granny. According to this tale, there is gold buried on land in Arknakelty, washed down from the mountains. In her story she even included clues to where to find it.
Johnny invites his neighbours to help him take advantage of Rushborough’s supposed naiveté. Trey quickly realizes her father is running a con-within-a-con, but for her own reasons decides to help him with his scheme.
Trey has become a skilled carpenter under the tutelage of Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago policeman who two years ago bought and renovated a derelict cottage in their isolated community. Trey now works with him after school, mending and reselling old furniture.
In this tight-knit community, with its own rules and expectations, Cal is still considered an outsider, but he has gradually achieved a kind of acceptance, enhanced by his growing romantic attachment to Lena, a lifelong resident. Cal and Lena together have taken a near-parental interest in Trey’s well-being. Now they realize they may need to save Trey from herself — and she is not the only one at risk.
The various schemes-within-schemes don’t evolve quite as expected, and as the tension ratchets up, things become darker and more serious.
This tense and atmospheric thriller is a sequel to The Searcher, picking up the story two years after the events in the earlier book. The writing is vivid and often lyrical, with a memorable setting, believable dialogue and fully rounded characters. A central theme in both books is the characters’ struggles with defining right and wrong. Beliefs about revenge, justice, and loyalty are powerful forces underlying characters’ choices, which in turn put their lives, and those of their loved ones, in danger. And resolution is not always congruent with black and white legalities.
I predict that this is a book that will stay with you long after you finish it.
Tana French has been called the “First Lady of Irish Crime.” Her books have won awards including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction.
Born in Vermont to an Italian mother and an American father, as a child she lived in several different countries including Ireland, Malawi and Italy. She moved to Dublin in 1990 to attend Trinity College, where she trained as an actor. She credits her professional acting experience with giving her insight into characterization and creating inner dialogues, both strongly reflected in her writing.
She grew up reading mystery and crime novels, and wrote stories as a child, but didn’t return to writing until her thirties. In a lull between acting jobs, she began writing the scenes that became her first novel. In the Woods was published in 2007, the year she turned 34. She followed that book with five more in the Dublin Murder Squad series. Her approach to a police procedural series was somewhat unusual: each book has a different primary character, but the protagonist in each book appeared in the previous novel as a secondary character.
More recently she published The Witch Elm (2018) as a standalone novel. The Searcher (2020) seemed at first to be another standalone, but The Hunter (2024) is now a second in the series — and French says she may write a third, making this a trilogy.
Tana French lives in Dublin with her husband, Anthony Breatnach, and their two daughters.
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