Cal Hooper ends his relationship with the Chicago Police Department and his wife at about the same time and retires to a farm in western Ireland because it looked prettier than any of the others he saw for sale online. He doesn’t tell anyone he was a cop in his other life but this is Ireland and everyone knows anyway, pretty much before he’s all the way unpacked. Early on in the first novel he has a thought.

It’s occurred to him that he might have an undiscovered talent for letting things be.

This entire trilogy is an exercise in showing Cal in excruciating detail just how wrong he is, as  rural life in Ireland turns out to be less bucolic peace than involuntary conscription into internecine warfare as practiced by experts with centuries of experience behind them.

What he’s seen in action has been the power of backcountry men, men who would never in a million years call in the official authorities to fix a problem, even if it would do any good; who do it themselves instead, neatly and ruthlessly, maintaining the rule of a law constructed from unspoken codes and understandings that run generations deep.

The Searcher opens at the beginning of his odyssey into Ardnakelty life when a waif named Trey shows up at his door and bullies him into looking for the waif’s brother. Cal finds the brother but in circumstances that do nothing to satisfy the waif’s thirst for revenge, which resolution plays out over the narrative of the second novel, The Hunter. In the third, The Keeper, the rape, ruin, and run with the money guys threaten to flatten Ardnakelty into a site suitable for a factory and a mall. See backcountry men above.

The craftsmanship in character and plot are at a very high level indeed but what I loved most about these books is French’s ability to turn the people of Ireland themselves into the setting.

“They’ve got aliens in America as well,” Bobby says defensively. “They’ve more than anyone, sure.”
“Nowhere has fuckin’ aliens.”
“Half a dozen people seen them lights last spring. What d’you think that was? The fairies?”
“That was Malachy Dwyer’s poteen. A few sups of that and I see lights too. One night walking home from Malachy’s, I seen a white horse wearing a bowler hat cross the road in front of me.”
“Did it kill your sheep?”
“Damn near kilt me. I jumped so high I went arse over tip into the ditch.”

That, right there, is why you go down the pub in Ireland. So is this:

“Not exactly,” Cal says. The first violent flare of the poteen is dying down, but it still feels smarter to stick to short sentences.

But you should stay away from the poteen. Don’t ask me how I know.

Which is not to say that French can’t illuminate the countryside surrounding Ardnakelty in vivid detail when she wants to.

Below her, the fields sprawl out, a mosaic of varying greens in odd-angled shapes that Trey knows as well as the cracks on her bedroom ceiling. The haymaking is underway: tiny baling machines trundle back and forth, deftly tracking the unexplained curves of the stone walls and leaving yellow cylinders in their wake like droppings. The lambs are white scraps skittering across the grass.

You can almost smell it. And this is why you always shop at the local store:

Noreen—of course—has company. Doireann Cunniffe is nestled up to the counter, where she can lean in to Noreen to catch every word first, and Tom Pat Malone is settled well into the corner chair that Noreen keeps for people who need a rest before they start home. Mrs. Cunniffe is little and excitable, with funny teeth and a head that sticks forward, and she wears pink cardigans even in this heat. Tom Pat is a curled scrap of a man, well into his eighties, who can tell the weather and is the hereditary possessor of a recipe for wool-fat salve that cures everything from eczema to rheumatism. He was named after his grandfathers and has to be called by both names in order to avoid offending either, even though they’ve both been dead for fifty years.

French also excels at commentary on current sociological mores.

In Cal’s view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year’s pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had. And on top of that, the right terms change every few years, so that someone who thinks like Ben has to be always listening for other people to tell him what’s moral and immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a man, or a woman either, goes about having a sense of right and wrong.

I binge read this trilogy back to back, and then I turned right around and read it again. You have been warned.

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Book Review Monday Chatter Cal Hooper series Tana French