The Keeper is the closer to Tana French's magnificent series of crime novels set in the west of Ireland and featuring retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper.
I don't ordinarily review novels that conclude a series because the power of a finale derives from all that's come before. But if you're game to read the first two Cal Hooper books, or if you're already a fan, know that The Keeper solidifies this series' status as a contemporary classic.
By now, after reckoning with local gangs, drug dealers and con-artists, Cal has lost much of his innocence about the quaint village of Ardnakelty, his adoptive home. He knows that evil can fester under shamrocks as abundantly as it does on city streets.
In this finale, however, it's not so much the victims of crime who need Cal's protection but the land itself. Ardnakelty's pristine beauty is under threat from the machinations of a developer with political connections. French, who's already proven herself to be an exquisite nature writer on par with the likes of Norman Maclean and Annie Dillard, has the chops to render Cal's final rescue mission an epic environmental one.
The Keeper opens at the local town shop where we're told, "Cal would expect to get wind of trouble, ... from pregnancy to potato blight." As he's buying eggs and chatting with Noreen, the proprietor, in comes Tommy Moynihan, "strid[ing] into the shop like he's walking into a merger meeting." Here's more of that introduction to this hail-fellow-well-met:
Tommy is some kind of big shot in the meat-processing-plant over towards Kilhone, ... He’s got a farmer’s solid bulk, a politician’s frozen silver hair, a C-list cattle baron’s ranch house, a Range Rover the size of a buffalo, and an annual family holiday to Mexico. Cal dislikes Tommy, ...
Tommy's son, a smarmy nepo baby named Eugene, is about to propose to a sweet local girl named Rachel when she goes missing and is later found dead in the river. The Guards, the Irish police, are called in, but the town conducts its own parallel investigation via rumor into whether Rachel's death is an accident, suicide or murder.
Meanwhile, Cal learns that large parcels of farmland around Ardnakelty are being bought up. Housing estates, factories, data centers — who knows what's in store? I'll leave the plot summary there except to say that in unexpected-but-satisfying ways these two major storylines converge.
The wonder of French's style is that her novels unfold almost exclusively through conversations in which she conveys the deeper messages lurking inside everyday speech. There's a scene early on here that should be taught in MFA programs: Tommy, with son Eugene in tow, surprises Cal outside his cottage. Tommy wants to hire Cal to investigate Rachel's death; he also tries to finagle an invite into Cal's cottage. After all, rain is imminent. The tension mounts as, with nothing but smiling pleasantries coming out of their mouths, it's clear these two men are telling each other to go to the devil.
Given French's subtle style any blunt speech is startling. Toward the end of the novel, Cal is riding in the company of Mart Lavin, an older man who's been a kind of genius loci — a spirit of the place — throughout this series. Cal is feeling good about temporarily beating back the developer when Mart urges him to look out the car window:
All around them the stone walls spread out in a pattern as individual and intimate as a fingerprint. The rain has faded; ... the greens and tawny-golds of the fields have a strange rich glow, like they’ve been infiltrated by some other self from a memory or a dream.
“In ten or twenty or thirty years,” Mart says, “that’ll be gone. ...
Take a good look while you can, boyo. That’s the last of it.
Mart is telling Cal that their fight against the developers is doomed, but what else can they do but keep on fighting? The Cal Hooper books, like all great detective series, are about time and loss and the uphill struggle to repair the world. The detectives rarely succeed in any lasting way, but we readers love them because they try.
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