The Keeper by Tana French

The Keeper by Tana French

2026 (published this week)

 

Tana French is one of my favourite contemporary writers, I will automatically read anything she produces. All her books are haunting, live on in your mind.

Her Dublin Murder Squad books (several on the blog) were wonderful satisfying police procedurals. There was a long-hot-summer-in-the-past book – the kind where a group of young people behaved foolishly and badly and must live with the consequences. That was The Wych Elm, a standalone.

Then her books took a sharp turn: instead of Dublin we had a small town in the back end of nowhere, with an American incomer, a former cop from Chicago called Cal. He has bought a house and a small amount of land in Ardnakelty, and is working at carpentry. He becomes very involved with the people in the town: Noreen in the shop for gossip and supplies. His older neighbour Marty, liaison with the town and the other men, and his guide to how everything works. Lena is his love interest, with a slow-moving cautious romance. And most important of all there is his young friend Trey, whose family featured large in the last book.

The forerunners are both on the blog:

The Searcher by Tana French 2020

The Hunter by Tana French 2024

Cal Lena and Trey, together with their dogs, form a fake-family.

Trouble certainly follows them round in this town…

A young woman goes missing, and is found dead. She was popular, and was about to get engaged to the son of a less-popular, but wealthy and influential, family. Something went wrong that night: did she then commit suicide? Her body was washed away in the river, lost for some time, so there are few clues.

French creates a whole world in the town: the undercurrents, the trail that starts with a community's being self-governing, looking after and out for themselves, and moves on to corruption and threats. She looks at the economics of modern life, the future (if any) for young people in a small town. And the question: if you step out of line are you bravely standing out or are you letting everyone down?

And – of course – who is buying up land, and why? Land always at the heart of Irish life and Irish crime.

Interspersed with this there are wonderful scenes from life, dialogue, events, and comedy that would make a fantastic stage play – in the shop, in the bar. Trey has a new friend, and we’re all checking them out.

Many people are inclined to believe that the dead girl’s would-be fiancé is responsible for her suicide. When he comes into the bar, one of the regulars starts up, but not how you might be expecting:

Out of nowhere, Francie leans back on the banquette and starts to sing.

‘There is an alehouse in this town

Where my love goes and sits him down

He takes another on his knee

And he tells to her what he won’t tell me  . . .’

 

‘He went upstairs and the door he broke

He found her hanging from a rope

He took his knife and he cut her down

And in her pocket these words he found  . . .’

The hum has spread throughout the pub, a low drone rising beneath Francie’s voice.

‘Oh dig my grave both wide and deep

Put a marble stone at my head and feet

And in the middle a turtle dove

So the whole world knows that I died for love.’

The deep hum holds and fades, and the pub is silent. Everyone watches.

It is a chilling, heart-stopping, wholly convincing scene. And it is just singing.

Later French refers back in her inimitable style:

Cal feels he’s earned a pint. If anyone gives him hairy looks for being a wife-beater, he can sing intimidating folk songs at them. No one does, though.

There’s jeopardy for Lena, in an unexpected way, and part of you thinks ‘that couldn’t happen in the 2020s’, but it’s scarily convincing and horrible and genuinely creepy.

And there are some other shocking surprises, even when you think you know what happened.

French’s ability to switch from gentle comedy and scenes of country life to uncomfortable and unnerving menace is unmatched.

In the middle of a very tense and important scene, when fathers are being compared:

‘My daddy wasn’t a prick,’ Francie points out.

‘Ah, he was,’ Senan says.

‘Sometimes, only. As a hobby. Not as a f-ing’ career.’ 

The dialogue always has wonderful rhythms, this is the way people speak in this town, you think, even when the content is strange or unfamiliar…

There is a regular, Mrs Duggan, who sits in her window on the main street watching, and knows everything that goes on and all the secrets. She is persuaded to tell what she knows. I am happy to enjoy this kind of development, but I do simultaneously think it is a cheat. And – and I don’t think you are going to be expecting this – there is a remarkable similarity with two of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver books (IKR?). I said on one of them:

There is a woman who can conveniently hear all local phone calls on her party line. This could have worked well, but I thought didn’t, and the book tailed off into ‘let’s ask Telephone Girl again’, a lot of repetition, and some not very difficult working out by Miss Silver, treated as genius by all around her. 

I wouldn’t quite say this about French, but it did seem a bit too easy – although Mrs Duggan herself was an enjoyable grotesque.

There is much more about this series in the earlier two posts, including this helpful gloss from the author:

French sees them as cowboy stories, set in the equivalent of the Wild West. A frontier town with its own rules and sense of justice.

(the book contains neither horse-riding nor the sea, but the cowboy theme suggested this picture would work)

It is not essential to read the series in order but it will increase the pleasure and interest, so start with The Searcher if you can.

Photos taken in Ireland summer 2025 by myself and various friends.