The Hunter by Tana French

The Hunter by Tana French

Read by Roger Clark

16 hours, 24 minutes

Published March 2024 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.

Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey's long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn't want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

My Thoughts: 

Tana French is one of the author's whose books I will pick up without having the slightest idea what they are about. I read all six of the books in her Dublin Murder Squad series and there wasn't a weak link in the bunch. Five years ago she introduced us to Cal Hooper in The Searcher; I was so excited to find that she was writing a second book about Cal and couldn't wait to get my hands on this one. And now I'm crossing my fingers that this is not just a two book series. I'm looking this series as much as I did the Dublin Murder Squad series; possibly even more. 

I was recently trying to describe this book to someone, to put it into a neat genre. But it's not a book that easily falls into any one genre. Yes, there is a murder...eventually. It's a bit of a Western (and it is set in western Ireland)...there's even a bit of a gold rush.  I suppose it could be characterized as a crime novel, there's plenty of crime to be had in it. But it's far more about its characters and their relationships and an exploration of the grey areas between good and bad. 

It's a slow build of a book, but I was perfectly fine with that as we are reintroduced to the inhabitants of Ardnakelty, with all of their eccentricities, humor and long history. Relationships deepen and change. Hidden agendas are uncovered, motives revealed. Ardnakelty is much like a family - they can tease and hold grudges amongst themselves, but outsiders beware. More than two years after he's arrived, Cal is still something of an outsider, which is fine with him. As a former police officer, he struggles with the law of the land he now calls home. But in protecting Trey, and the others in the community he has grown fond of, he has to learn that sometimes things aren't just black and white. 

This one will still be on my best-of list at the end of the year, both as a novel and as a audiobook. Roger Clark does an incredible job. Clark is an Irish-American actor who easily handles the different accents and the storytelling. 

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

496 pages

Published July 2024 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

My Thoughts: 

This is one of those books that's gotten so much buzz in the last few months that I'd almost convinced myself not to read it, knowing there was no way it could live up to that hype. But I'd read and loved Moore's Long Bright River in 2020 (a series adaptation of which is set to premiere March 13th on Peacock) and knew that she could write a book that would make me want to stay up late reading. So as soon as I thought I could manage a 500 page book, I checked it out. 

I tried to give my husband a quick summary of this once I was done and he felt it sounded like one of those movies where there is just too much going on, too many characters, too many terrible things happening. You know the kind of movies I'm taking about, the kind where the character's phone runs out of battery just as her car dies on a dark road with a killer somewhere on the loose nearby. And I get that. There are a lot of characters, the book bounces back and forth in time, there are a lot of relationships that play out different ways over time, there actually is a mass murder on the loose, and we're getting the narrative from a lot of different perspectives. Not many people could make it work. Liz Moore does. 

"A long novel that at first is hard to put down. By page 200, impossible." —Stephen King

I couldn't have said it better than Stephen King (well, of course I couldn't!). I got into work later than usual every day last week because I couldn't put this one day once I started reading it while I ate breakfast. The hubby had to pitch in to make dinners because once I sat down to read after work, I couldn't be bothered to cook. It all worked for me and the closer I got to the end, the more I could justify letting the wet laundry sit in the washer a few hours, the dirty carpet go unvacuumed. 

If there is a flaw at all, it's that some of the rich male characters are a little too stereotyped. But most of the characters in this book are so well developed, particularly most of the females (whose points of view are the ones we get most of). The area the story is set in comes alive: the woods, the camp, the danger of the area, the struggle of the locals once the only factory around shuts down. 

I'm pretty darn glad that this one is on my book club's list for 2025. I can't wait to discuss it with them, even if that is months from now. This one is going on my Best of 2025 list, where it will likely remain at the end of the year. 

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

336 pages

Published July 2023 by Doubleday

Publisher's Summary: 

It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It’s strictly the straight-and-narrow for him — until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated – and deadly. 

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime. It’s getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook – to their regret. 

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. (“Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!”), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.

My Thoughts: 

My first Colson Whitehead book was his masterpiece The Underground Railroad. Of it I said, "It is the rare book that more than lives up to the hype that has swirled around it." Here's the thing about Whitehead: it is not a rare thing at all for his books to live up to the hype. Crook Manifesto is the fourth book by Whitehead I've read and I'm astonished by his ability to...well, I'm just astonished by his ability. 

Crook Manifesto is a follow up to Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (my review here). We're again brought into the world of Ray Carney, furniture store owner who has worked hard, since we last met him, to stay on the up-and-up. In this book, Whitehead has broken his story into three different years that show the decline of Harlem and New York City in general. In the first act, we're again brought into the world of Ray Carney, furniture store owner who has worked hard, since we last met him, to stay on the up-and-up. 

In typical Ray fashion, and in a bid to be a good dad and connect with his daughter, in the first act of this book, Ray finds himself once again involved in the tough life of Harlem. Also in typical Ray fashion, he finds a way out. Things we love about Ray: 1) he tries very hard to be a better father than his own father was (not all that tough), 2) he wants to be a good man but life in 1970's Harlem makes that difficult, and 3) Ray always seems to find a way out. 

Act two finds Ray taking a step back in the action, when Hollywood comes to Harlem via a wealthy arsonist named Zippo who has dreams of being a famous director. Here readers are reintroduced to Ray's friend Pepper, a thug who does what needs to be done. Pepper has been hired as a guard on set but is called in to find the leading lady when she goes missing. Pepper solves problems in the way you would expect a thug to solve them but it always seems appropriate to the situation. In the end both Zippo and Pepper will find themselves back the worlds they come from. 

In the third act, both men must work together, facing both the so-called underbelly of Harlem and the elite. 

Violent? Yes, all of the Whitehead books that I've read are very violent. As a general rule, I'm not a fan of violence in books but in Whitehead's books it feels very necessary to set the tone, to force the reader to accept the reality of the world he's created. Genre? Yeah, Whitehead's book defy genre. Is it a crime novel? Yes...and no. Crime drives the action but this is a book about family and community. I was so impressed with Whitehead's ability to put me right into 1960's Harlem in Harlem Shuffle and he's done it again here. Within pages I was envisioning 1970's New York City, remembering images of that time from watching the news when I was growing up. Whitehead is unparalleled in his ability to do that. 

"It was a glorious June morning. The sun was shin gin, the birds were signing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night's crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven. Summer in New York that bicentennial year was full of promise and menace in every sign and wonder, no matter how crummy or small."

The reviewer in The Atlantic said that Whitehead had lost the plot in this book. Now, I know that that reviewer is a professional but I feel like he missed the point. The plot is there, just not in the way we would typically see it. It's one of the reasons that I loved this book. It was, as Whitehead's books so often are, unexpected and, for me, perfect.