The Searchers by Tana French **** (of 4)

Looking to escape a recent divorce and 25 years as a Chicago cop - the divorce and his job are related - Cal Hooper buys himself a fixer-upper on the edge of a small Irish village. Literally and metaphorically, Cal strips wallpaper, clears cobwebs, chips at peeling paint, and rambles the Irish countryside. His neighbor, Mart, a bachelor farmer getting on in years, but gifted with an Irish sense of gab, regularly comes down to lean on Cal's fence to shoot the shite. 

Cal's life goes awry when 12-year-old Trey shows up outside his living room window. At night. Trey comes from a fatherless family up in the mountains. Mom is poor and broken. Siblings are young and filthy or older and missing, some by choice, and as Trey finally makes clear, one brother appears to be gone without a trace.

French's strength as a writer is to capture landscape, personality and dialogue with such precision that her readers are grabbed by the arm, hauled into an Irish pub, and made part of the commotion of jokes, repetitious arguments, and penny-whistled tunes, before even realizing that perhaps we have taken in one too many pints. A little tipsy by the speed and efficacy of her skill we find that we have joined Trey and Cal in a search for a missing teenager and for our own place in a society that makes us feel like outsiders even when surface chat feels warm and welcoming.