Pun Salad

This is third entry (and, according to the WSJ reviewer, the final entry) in Tana French's series featuring the protagonist Cal Hooper, a divorced Chicago ex-cop who has moved to the small Irish village of Ardnakelty.

Cal is somewhat less of a out-of-water fish in this book. He has accumulated a sorta-fiancee, Lena. And Trey, the semi-feral teenager in the previous books has become a sorta-daughter. But Cal feels, correctly, that situation is precarious on all counts. Ardnakelty runs on gossip and rumor, it seems. And that goes into full gear when young Rachel Holohan, goes missing; Cal finds her in a local river, an apparent suicide.

Which might have been the end of it, but Rachel was engaged to Eugene, son to Tommy Moynahan, a local rich bigshot. And it turns out that Tommy has a secret scheme in the works to mess with Ardnakelty's bucolic scenery. Did Rachel know too much about it?

Ms. French is one of the few writers that I consider to be auto-buys at Amazon. Here's a paragraph I snipped out of my Kindle version, describing the search for Rachel:

They have about two miles of road to cover, curving between dry stone walls and fields and the occasional farmhouse. They head back the way they came, sweeping the flashlight beams down the verges, over long grass and tangles of dead wildflowers. The dark is windless and silent; small things scuttle away at their approach, and watch from hiding as they pass. The air smells, more powerfully and intricately than by day, of ripe earth, sodden leaves, and manure. Far off, spread out across the fields, other small lights swing and zigzag. A long call comes to them faintly, too distant to hear the name, if they didn’t already know what it is.

I don't know about you, but those little tossed-off details, compactly told, put me there. It's only one example of how Ms. French describes characters and their environment. If you want to see a writer at the top of her game, there you go.