The Searcher by Tana French

The Searcher (2020)

By Tana French 

388 pages (Kindle Digital Edition)

Rating 4/5 

Genres : Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller, Defective, Noir, 2023-read 

The author transports the reader into the world of a fictitious town in Ireland through the eyes of a retired American cop Cal Hooper .. makes us walk in his shoes ..  see the things he sees, feel the things he feels .. it is grand! She also takes time to build the people in the story into proper characters with their own personalities, eccentricities and natures .. so when they do something, it doesn't raise eyebrows coming from them. 

This story mainly revolves around : A missing boy. A creature that is attacking at night and mutilating the bodies of sheep and ewes. Few people trying to figure out a mystery. Few others warning them off and knowing more than they let on. Its good!

A cop with Chicago P.D. takes voluntary retirement and moves to a small rural area in Ireland to settle into an unchallenging and uneventful life. A boy in the town befriends him and asks him to trace the whereabouts of his elder brother who had not been seen in the area for a while. The boy's family is poor, squalid, cast off and ill treated in the town. No one cares enough for them to lift a finger until this cop comes in. Thr brother could have run away from a futureless hometown or got himself involved in something insalubrious and got taken. He is an optimistic kid and no one really believes him dead.  

Its a small enough village that everyone knows and gets a whiff of every small thing the cop is doing. He is a man solo with no police force backing him up in this foreign place. I felt if not for the angle of drugs and narcotics, the story could have been more suspenseful,chilling and spine tingling.  Nevertheless,  am going with a 4 out of 5 for this one! Cheers!!