I need someone to have a quiet word with Tana French. And maybe with her publishers. Hell, both.
The Keeper is the third and, supposedly, the final book in the Cal Hooper trilogy. I did a full review of the first book, The Searcher, and a reviewlet of the second, The Hunter. There is something great about this series, y’all, and I refuse to admit that it’s over in a fashion that rarely happens to me with series fiction. I absolutely insist on more books in this series, or at least that French starts a new series where she follows Trey as she moves on from Ardnakelty. It’s not like her Dublin Murder Squad series didn’t already establish a precedent for each book following a side character from the previous one. I love these characters and I love this setting, and God damn it, I’m not ready for or interested in this being over yet.
But let me back up, for the benefit of people who haven’t been reading this site since 2021 and don’t click on links: the Cal Hooper books follow, you guessed it, Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who moves to Ireland on a whim in the first book and buys a fixer-upper in the tiny and fictional town of Ardnakelty. He quickly finds himself more or less adopted by a feral thirteen-year-old girl named Trey, and … well, he’s an ex-cop. It’s a Tana French book. There are shenanigans afoot. By the start of the third book, Cal is engaged to a local woman named Lena, Trey is seventeen and effectively Cal’s foster daughter, and Cal no longer feels like an outsider to Ardnakelty. In fact, the idea of not becoming part of Ardnakelty is a major theme in this book; Lena feels like Cal is growing too comfortable with the more pathological aspects of living in such a small town, and Trey, who was all about escaping Ardnakelty at her earliest possible opportunity at first, is contemplating leaving school for a carpentry apprenticeship and is tentatively exploring a relationship with a girlfriend.
And then a local girl, right around Trey’s age, is found drowned in a river, and the autopsy reveals antifreeze in her stomach, and we’re off to the races again.
Perhaps “off to the races” is the wrong phrase. This book is many things; in a hurry is none of them, and while it’s every bit as compelling a read as the previous two volumes, this one is even more about the three main characters and the culture of Ardnakelty than the first books were, and the plot is really an excuse to dive into their personalities and their relationships. There’s an intentionality about Cal’s relationship with Trey in particular that I, as someone with a couple of pseudo-adoptive kids of my own*, can really recognize and relate to, and Lena comes forward quite a bit more in this book than she has in the past.
Ardnakelty itself is much more of a character in this book than it has been in the past, too, and the way the book uses Rachel Holohan’s death to investigate themes of inheritance and change and destiny is really awesome. I’m not quite ready to call this French’s best book, something I also said about The Searcher, but it’s a tremendous piece of work and it really makes me want to reread the series from the start. If you’ve read the previous books you no doubt already have your eye on this one, but if you haven’t, at this point there’s no reason to wait.
(*) I don’t talk about them often, but I have two former students who call me Dad and mean it, and a handful who have tossed the word around a couple of times.
