"The Searcher" by Tana French

The Searcher by Tana French (published last month) has many of the same features as her several earlier novels that I’ve read: suspense, violence (but not too horrible), well-developed characters with just enough Irish idioms in their speech, and lots of rural Irish color. The plot is straightforward: no subplots, no blind alleys. Writing a review is difficult, however, because almost anything interesting that I could say would be a really bad spoiler. I think I like some of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad novels better, but this one is fine too.

Since I don't want to spoil the story, I'll just quote some of the food and local color paragraphs because I find them quite enjoyable. Right at the beginning, the love of the Irish countryside becomes a major theme, with the explanation for why the central character Cal, a retired Chicago policeman, has chosen to move into a decrepit cottage somewhere outside of a small town in Ireland:

"The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face." (p. 3).

The tiny town near Cal's cottage includes a grocery store that plays a big role in the plot:

"Noreen’s shop packs a lot into a little space. It’s floor-to-ceiling with shelves crammed with the essentials of life— tea bags, eggs, chocolate bars, scratch cards, dish soap, baked beans, batteries, jam, tinfoil, ketchup, firelighters, painkillers, sardines— and a variety of things, like golden syrup and Angel Delight, that Cal doesn’t understand but has ambitions to try if he can work out what to do with them. It has a little fridge for milk and meat, a basket of depressed-looking fruit, and a ladder so Noreen, who’s about five foot one, can reach the high shelves. The shop smells of all those things, with a strong underlay of some uncompromising disinfectant straight out of 1950." (p. 63).

Irish food, especially breakfasts, is a central food theme. Cal is always frying bacon, toasting toast, and feeding a few other people. Right at the start: "The frying pan is hot. Cal throws in four slices of bacon, meatier and tastier than what he’s used to, and once the fat sizzles cracks in two eggs." (p. 8). Or the menu offered to a guest who doesn't accept -- “I got toast with bacon and eggs, or toast without bacon and eggs.” (p. 350). Or the menu when he eats by himself:

"He fixes himself a big breakfast, bacon, sausages, eggs and black pudding— he hasn’t worked out whether he likes black pudding, exactly, but he feels he should occasionally eat it out of respect for local custom." (p. 287). 

Black pudding seems to be key to a full Irish breakfast. It is also English; in fact, it was mentioned in the latest episode of the Great British Baking Show. Black pudding, a type of blood sausage, was on offer at a B&B where I once stayed in Dublin -- the host said he would serve it to us, but only if we really wanted to eat it. Lots of Americans evidently left it on the plate, which he didn't appreciate. 

My Irish breakfast in a B&B where we stayed in 2011.
I could have had bacon and black pudding if I had wanted it!

French's character Cal, among other things, knows how to hunt. He spends a lot of the novel waiting until he has an Irish gun license, so that he can legally buy and use a new rifle to shoot a rabbit for a rabbit stew. Once the rabbit has been shot, cleaned, and readied as food, he fries it, first shaking "chunks of meat in a plastic bag of flour, salt and pepper" and then frying them in oil "with strips of bell pepper and onion and some garlic. ... 'If I had tomatoes and mushrooms,' he says, 'we could throw those in too, but Noreen’s tomatoes weren’t looking too perky this week. This’ll do fine. We’ll have it with rice.'" (p. 261).

Another feature of Cal's Irish rural life, along with the pretty woods and fields, is the cold and damp: 

"He goes out to his woods and spends a couple of hours collecting dead branches to stack for firewood. The cold has settled in, and a fine net curtain of rain hangs in the air. Whenever Cal leaves the house, even just to take out the trash, he doesn’t feel a drop hit him, but he gets back inside damp through. Somehow it seeps inside the house, too: no matter how long he keeps the fire burning and the oil heater on, his sleeping bag and his duvet always feel almost imperceptibly damp. He buys another heater for his bedroom, which helps some but not a whole lot." (p. 328). 

In sum, this is really a book about Ireland! Reading it made me want to go back and experience some of the things we've seen and done on several trips there. The old stone walls, the ruined cottages that people believe were abandoned during the famine almost 200 years ago, the villages where young people are leaving for the city or for America, and the long-standing relationships of the rural people are all beautifully portrayed against the background of an excellent Tana French mystery.

Blog post and original photo © 2011, 2020 mae sander.