"Trey says, with absolute bedrock certainty, 'He wouldn't do that.' Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can't any more."
Western Ireland is the setting for this tale about a semi-retired Chicago cop who tries to start over in wide open spaces. The pastoral small town proves no escape from missing kids, child abuse, gangs, drugs, and suspicious neighbors, however, and Tana French digs deliciously into the nooks and crannies to paint this landscape.
"'Sure, they oughtn't to give you a gun anyway,' Barty the barman told him, when he pointed this out.
"'Why not?'
"'Because you're American. Ye're all mental with the guns, over there. Shooting them off at the drop of a hat. Blowing some fella away because he bought the last packet of Twinkies in the shop. The rest of us wouldn't be safe.'"
"The air is practically solid with the interleaved smells of sweat, cigarette smoke, beer farts and crusted sheets."
In the end, "The Searcher" may have bit off more than it can chew for some, with a myriad of societal issues and mysteries resolved rather simply in the end.
The ease with which insular Irishmen open up to a former police officer and generational farmers share their feelings with an outsider is a bit hard to come to terms with, as is a bizarre gender reveal halfway through the book.
"Men with no children get to feeling unsafe, when they get older. The world's changing and they've no young people to show them it's grand, so they feel like they're being attacked. Like they need to be ready for a fight the whole time."
As a quick-hitting, engrossing read with an atmospheric feel, "The Searcher" fits the bill. Those searching for something a bit more complex may want to check out French's other work.
"Church," Mart tells him, pulling his tobacco pouch out of a jacket pocket and finding an undersized rollie, "is for women. The spinsters, mostly; they do like to get themselves in a tizzy over whose turn it is to do the second reading, or the altar flowers. And the mammies bring in the childer so they won't grow up heathens, and the aul' ones showing off that they're not dead yet. If a young lad starts going to mass, it's a bad sign. Something's not sitting right, in his life or in his head."
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