To understand modern Ireland, read Tana French

Tana French established her reputation with the six novels of her Dublin Murder Squad series – a smart, literary spin on the classic police procedural that drew on Irish history, myth and politics, and combined sharp contemporary dialogue with psychological heft and a lyrical style not often associated with crime fiction.

The books won French a raft of awards and a legion of admirers on both sides of the Atlantic (a recent New York Times books newsletter was headlined “New! Tana! French!”, echoing the level of excitement her devotees bring to any such announcement). And because she had adopted the device of foregrounding a different member of the squad as protagonist each time, the Dublin Murder series had the potential to continue indefinitely, racking up millions more in sales and delighting fans with predictable regularity.

Instead, French turned her attention from those representatives of the law charged with solving crimes to the people who find themselves on the other side of an investigation. In The Wych Elm (2018), her first standalone novel, the narrator is, at various times, victim, innocent suspect and possible perpetrator; through his eyes, the detectives are no longer flawed instruments of justice, but shadowy antagonists to be feared and outwitted.

The Keeper, her 10th novel, is the concluding part of a trilogy that began with The Searcher in 2020, and which shifted perspective again. Here, her investigator is Cal Hooper, a 50-ish former Chicago police detective who pitches up in rural west Ireland looking for a peaceful retirement. He is quickly disabused of the idea that the “sweet soft greens” of Ardnakelty offer any kind of respite from the worst of human nature – this is a place where people can “disappear” into bogs and up in the mountains – and over the course of The Searcher and its first sequel, The Hunter, Cal is forced to recalibrate his ideas of justice and his own moral code. Part of that recalibration involves understanding the history of the place, and the way the locals’ attitude to the law and authority has been shaped by centuries of dispossession and colonial rule:

“Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen below the official inquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it’ll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice.”

Cal’s guide in this aspect of assimilation is his neighbour Mart Lavin, a wily bachelor farmer who functions as a kind of tutelary spirit through the trilogy, embodying the multiple layers of ambiguity that characterise Ardnakelty. Mart deserves a place in the pantheon of great Irish literary characters: he is a natural leader who can switch on the twinkly eyed blarney when it suits, but is capable of absolute ruthlessness, as observed by Cal’s fiancee, Lena Dunne, in The Hunter:

“Lena, who has been called cold plenty of times and acknowledges some truth in that, recognises it when she sees it: under all the chat and the mischief, which are real enough, Mart is cold as stone.”

As with the two previous books, the plot of The Keeper centres on a mysterious death. Twenty-one-year-old Rachel Holohan, a well-liked local girl, is found dead in the river. Suicide or accident? Ardnakelty’s rumour mill quickly settles on the former, directing the blame at Rachel’s boyfriend, Eugene Moynihan, for breaking her heart. This neat version of events is complicated by the fact that Rachel turned up at Lena’s house in tears, only hours before her death, asking opaque questions about how to cope when you have to choose between your man and your community.

Lena does some digging of her own and comes to suspect that Rachel had found out something that made her a potential liability to the Moynihans. Eugene’s father, Tommy, is “some kind of big shot in the meat-processing plant over towards Kilhone, which makes him Mr Big-Balls in this townland”. Tommy has been buying up strategic parcels of farmland and finagling Eugene into local politics; the general consensus in the pub is “that fucker knows something”.

As Cal and Lena conduct their parallel investigations, it appears that Rachel is a casualty of a larger conflict centred on people’s relationship with the land, and Ireland’s tussle between progress and tradition. “It takes more than a few years and a hashtag to change a place,” Mart tells Cal. “In this country we’re fierce proud of how modern we are; we’d bulldoze every bitta history in the place for data centres, if it’d get us a pat on the head off the big corporations. But some of the old ways don’t bulldoze easy.”

Those old ways run deep; there are glancing references to Ireland’s bog bodies, pre-Christian burials – sometimes young women – thought to have been sacrificed for the greater good of the tribe. There are mentions, too, of how small Irish communities dealt with women who stepped out of line, and within living memory: “She tells herself it’s not the Nineties: Tommy can’t have her tidied away into a mental hospital, the way his daddy and Father Gerard did with Marie Moynihan when she stopped being a good girl and keeping her mouth shut.”

French has an easy way of weaving in history and Irish literature – The Keeper ends with an overt homage to Joyce’s The Dead – and wears her learning lightly. She remains, for my money, one of the finest writers of ensemble dialogue in contemporary fiction, her instinctive ear for the rhythms of conversation up there with the likes of Roddy Doyle (perhaps a legacy of her earlier career as an actor). She is also drily funny: the local scumbag wears “the kind of tracksuit that Cal associates with multiple low-level felonies”; Eugene carries himself with “the air of a man about to file an elaborate grievance with HR”.

If the eventual solution to the whodunnit element feels psychologically less convincing than in the previous books, that has little effect on the novel’s overall richness. Ian Rankin once said that crime fiction is where the great social novels of our time are to be found, and with the Cal Hooper trilogy, French has proved herself again to be one of the most interesting and insightful chroniclers of contemporary Ireland.

The Keeper by Tana French is published by Viking (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £14.44. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by The New York Times/Redux/eyevine