The Keeper by Tana French

“Centuries where the only safe way was the hidden way have bent this place’s DNA like hard prevailing winds bend trees; Ardnakelty has been formed to the circuitous, the elliptical, the plausibly deniable.”

This description of the remote village in the west of Ireland captures the spirit and suspensefulness of the Cal Hooper trilogy, in which The Keeper is the moody and momentous finale. It’s a story which demands much of Tana French’s seemingly boundless skills, honed through the Dublin Murder Squad series and then the more rural exploits of Cal, a retired Chicago detective who learns new rules of law and order in a place governed by the maxim “say nothing.”

No outsider ever truly becomes a native of Ardnakelty – it’s the kind of place where memories are so long that people bring their ailing pets to Cal’s fiancée, Lena Dunne, because she worked briefly as a vet’s assistant 30 years ago – but as we find Cal at the opening of The Keeper (the first two installments in the series are The Searcher and The Hunter), he has earned their trust and respect, not least because of his care, as a kind of foster parent, of a local teenager, Trey Reddy.

The set-up is unrushed to the point of being languid; French has always had a way of luring, even seducing, her reader into the story, and she begins by introducing the denizens of the community, including the local store and pub, many of them unmarried men in a village which young women have left to pursue bigger lives. French is American by birth and lived in several countries before stopping in Dublin in her late teens, and her command of the teasing linguistic quirks of Irish chat is absolute. Together the people are quite charming, and it is clear, in the early chapters, that Cal, Lena, and Trey are forging happy, productive lives for themselves.

Sudden as a record scratch, a middle-of-the-night call comes to Cal about a missing young woman, Rachel Holohan, who only hours earlier made a tearful visit to Lena but conspicuously held back what was really bothering her. Soon afterwards, a search party finds her dead in a nearby river. Rachel had been in a relationship since she was 16 with Eugene Moynihan, the son of Tommy, a wealthy and amoral local businessman, but it had been observed around town that the young couple no longer seemed happy.

The authorities determine, and it’s generally believed by the townsfolk, that Rachel went into the water by accident or of her own volition. But Lena wants to know why she died, and whether there was something she knew about the Moynihans that made her life untenable. What ensues in the village is as much psychological warfare as anything else. Like all French’s novels, this one is packed to the gunnels with conversation, meetings, information used as currency, people sizing one another up and parsing each other’s spoken and body language for the truth and the lie.

Setting is a forte of French’s, and Ardnakelty is so close-knit as to make the townsfolk codependent, or worse. Lena knows first that keeping to herself and minding her own business is noted by others, and then that her probing into Rachel’s death represents a breaking of the rules. Even though the residents seemingly live to gossip about each other, no one is ever supposed to suffer real consequences, as one line reveals: “The townland doesn’t like being baulked. If it isn’t fed what it wants, it’ll make its own fodder.”

Much of that fodder is generated by the separate activities of Cal and Lena as they make their respective enquiries about the fate of Rachel and the motivations of Tommy Moynihan, and that separateness causes fractures in their close relationship.

French remains as interested as ever in class, wealth, and the shifts in Irish fortune, and in The Keeper she is concerned with the collapse of the small-holding farm economy and its replacement by monolithic corporations, which will bowl the Stone Age hedgerows and the town’s way of life.

As one pivotal character, Mart, tells Cal, “You don’t know what ‘twas like around here, bucko, when myself and Tommy were young lads. There was nothing . . .  no way to earn a living . . . You packed up your bits and bobs and off you went to England or America or Australia . . . Nowadays there’s more jobs than you can ate.” But those jobs come at a price.

This conversation is a pivotal one because it reveals to Cal, and the reader, how power and influence in Ardnakelty – from property development permits to approved parking spaces - are exercised outside officialdom and by rich, calculating men. The question is whether the death of Rachel will redirect any of these tributaries – or whether the currents of Ardnakelty will move around an obstacle only briefly before it is swallowed up and simply becomes part of the place’s lore.

That question is answered, though perhaps not to all readers’ satisfaction – there is confrontation and redemption, but French declines to deliver her rewards in predictable ways, and justice is done as the people see fit. It is an apt send-off for the folk of Ardnakelty and another of French’s stunning ventures into the heart of Irish darkness.

Reviewer: Stephanie Jones

Penguin