Throughout the book, the birds are anthropomorphized as a microcosm of the local natives and yet are also ruthless in the totally natural manner of the animal kingdom. Shortly after, when Cal is working in the house, “a sleek mid-sized rook landed on the sill of the open window, yelled what was obviously an insult, and then flapped off laughing.” Cal tries to make friends with them, offering them scraps and tempting them to come closer, but instead they “cuss him to hell and back again,” jeer, shout, bicker among themselves, scream abuse, and react to his approaches with “a collective eye-roll.” The book opens with Cal noticing that “the rooks have got hold of something,” a small animal, still alive, that they are ripping apart. Away to the north, a line of low mountains rolls along the horizon.” In the novel’s first few pages, we’re introduced to the main character, Cal, a former cop who has relocated (alone) from Chicago to rural Ireland, as well as the major themes of the story: the labor involved in the renovation of an old house, the task that Cal has set himself in his self-imposed exile, and Cal’s life as an outcast, exemplified in his relation to a flock of rooks nesting in a tree in his yard. French is the author of six novels in her “Dublin Murder Squad” police procedural series (the first two of which were recently filmed as The Dublin Murders, a TV series produced by the BBC and Starz), as well as a previous stand-alone novel, The Witch Elm.įrench portrays a rich Irish landscape at the edges of a townland in the west of the country: “The sky, dappled in subtle gradations of gray, goes on forever so do the fields, coded in shades of green by their different uses, divided up by sprawling hedges, dry-stone walls and the odd narrow back road. IN THE SEARCHER, Tana French stakes out new territory: a rural Irish setting quite different from the urban and suburban Ireland of her previous works, and a central character who is an American, while her previous characters have been native Irish.

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