What could be luckier? It’s March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day, and the internet is awash in shamrocks and pots of gold as I begin writing my review of THE KEEPER. But the country evoked in Tana French’s prize-winning, bestselling mysteries is hardly the land of leprechauns, bagpipes and traffic-snarling parades. Whether it’s a gritty urban police procedural like her Dublin Murder Squad series, or a tale like this one, set in the wild western countryside, her take on Ireland always feels fresh, complex and wonderfully authentic.

Which is ironic, because it turns out that French was born in Vermont and settled in Dublin only later, as a young woman. Yet there is such music in her prose that she reminds me of the Irishman John Banville, whose own peerless Quirke mysteries I have been bingeing recently. The fact that French was, at one point, an outsider in Ireland must have served as inspiration for her trilogy about Cal Hooper, a former Chicago police detective who settles in the tiny, isolated town of Ardnakelty.

Cal gets acquainted with his new home little by little, and we adapt along with him. He has learned, for example, that “Ardnakelty is too small to allow for much stratification; if you want company, you hang out with anyone who doesn’t drive you crazy, and probably some people who do.” The drama --- and humor --- of his path to acceptance by the locals is central to this book, as it was to the first two.

"This is a richly layered book, intricately plotted, with gripping action scenes and tension-laden verbal encounters in which Lena and Cal fence with Tommy and his minions. But there is also a poignant, philosophical quality..."

By the time of THE KEEPER, the third in the series, he’s been in Ardnakelty for three-and-a-half years. He’s engaged to a neighbor, Lena Dunne, and a quasi-parent to teenaged Trey Reddy, a girl from a troubled family that has played a prominent role in the first two books. In THE SEARCHER (2020), Cal used his investigative smarts to unravel the disappearance of Trey’s older brother, Brendan. THE HUNTER (2024) involved a fraudulent gold-mining scheme and the disruptive return of Trey’s ne’er-do-well father.

Now, however, things seem to have settled down. Trey, at 16, is still mouthy but no longer the half-feral kid we met in the first book. She plays football (aka soccer), has some semblance of manners, and could be starting a same-sex romance. Cal, meanwhile, is more or less accepted by the men (he appreciates “the shove and jostle of being part of a group of guys”), led by his eccentric and annoying neighbor, Mart. And Lena, a widow, though Ardnakelty born and bred, is content to keep “boundary walls” between herself and the town’s crushing demand for conformity and its voracious appetite for gossip.

But the quiet doesn’t last long. A young woman named Rachel Holohan goes missing, and the town launches a search. She is found face-down in a river, dead. Suicide? (No note was found.) Or could it be murder? Rachel was all but engaged to Eugene, the son of local bigwig Tommy Moynihan, whose meat-processing plant is said to have brought jobs and prosperity to Ardnakelty. Tommy has political ambitions for Eugene; he’s buying up land; and there are rumors of another factory --- all of which makes some townfolk trust him and arouses others’ suspicions.

Lena and Cal have reason to look into Rachel’s death --- Cal because a glimpse of a tense scene between Rachel and Eugene earlier that day aroused his cop “radar”; Lena because she’d had a visit from Rachel on the night she died, and the young woman had seemed to be having boyfriend trouble. And because they are gradually, and often amusingly, stumbling their way toward learning how to be parents to Trey, they are determined to protect her from the edginess and uncertainty that grip the town. In Ardnakelty, social relations largely follow gender lines, and so does French’s book, alternating Cal’s point of view --- bonding with other men to gather intel and organize confrontations --- with Lena’s perspective as she pays visits to local women to probe what they know about Rachel’s state of mind.

Tommy doesn’t like their investigations or the idea that his family had anything to do with Rachel’s death. He hits back, planting ugly false rumors about Cal and Lena and sending police officers to their homes armed with thinly veiled threats. Not everyone, however, does the Moynihans’ bidding. Cal sees “two kinds of power” at work: “Tommy’s, suited and badged, sleek with money and assurance and legal phrases; this other thing, rising up wordless and bare of any outside weaponry, smelling of earth and blood.” The main question here is not so much who caused Rachel’s death as who will believe the gossip and continue to say yes to Tommy, and who will resist the age-old habit of obedience and say no.

This is a richly layered book, intricately plotted, with gripping action scenes and tension-laden verbal encounters in which Lena and Cal fence with Tommy and his minions. But there is also a poignant, philosophical quality, as Cal unmasks the ugly truth beneath the rural beauty and small-town charm, the “straitjacket” imposed by Tommy and his pals. “He made the mistake, when he came here, of thinking he’d found a place that was innocent.” He mourns that lost dream but also comes to realize that that there is still something uniquely valuable about Ardnakelty: “intricate webs, constructed over centuries, that bind people to one another, to their land, and to their past.”

French herself has said that she was inspired by American Westerns in writing this trilogy, and I can see that. Ardnakelty is like a frontier outpost that’s accustomed to making its own rules and meting out its own justice. When the bad guys from the big city try to take over, the good guys --- helped by a mysterious gunslinger who blows into town one day --- mount a resistance.

Readers have to be patient, though. It takes many pages for Lena and Cal to realize why and how Rachel died, and what her death has revealed about the inner workings of the town. To appreciate THE KEEPER’s leisurely pace, you really need to have read the previous two books and become attached to French’s unconventional family (three people, three incredibly personable dogs, and some very annoying magpies). Cal and Lena are not married (yet), and Trey isn’t actually their daughter. But when it comes to mutual affection, loyalty and joy, they are the real thing.