Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

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 commo...

Detective Antoinette Conway has finally achieved her goal of reaching Dublin's murder squad, but Antoinette is not only the first woman to enter Ireland's male bastion of investigators, she is also the daughter of a dark-skinned (absentee) father. Conway is hazed mercilessly by her fellow officers who spit in her coffee when gets up from her desk, pat her backside, pee in her locker, throw away her files instead of handing them in, and mess with her computer.  Conway proudly stands her ground and when she and her partner are handed what should be a routine murder case -- girlfriend is reported dead in her living room right after her boyfriend is seen leaving the house in a hurry -- she does a full-on investigation.  As mysteries go, this one is just the right amount of tortuous to make it a page turner, but what Tana French does best is introduce us to the routine doubts and in-our-head-rebuttals that all of us endure. She does it by introducing complex, slightly flawed charac...

  Two aging Irish criminals - one with a bum leg and the other with a bad eye - are sitting in the ferry terminal in Algeciras, Spain. They are searching for the daughter of one of them who ran off three years ago. The daughter is pretty, petite, has dreadlocks, maybe a dog, and is hanging out with other European hippies and should be on a ferry going or arriving from Morocco. At least that is the information they have extracted from similar looking hippies they have cajoled and badgered. They know the day the daughter is supposed to be traveling so for 24-hours, the two of them sit in the terminal reminiscing and shooting the shite. They recall their days of running hashish from Morocco to Ireland and the time when they had too much money and what it was like to be living on the cliff edge of prosperity and panic. They speak of loves gained and lost and all in all a day goes by when not much happens, boatloads of humanity arrive and depart, a few drinks are had with a best bud, an...