The Hunter

The Hunter is Tana French's 2024 second instalment in the Cal Hooper series, published by Viking and a New York Times bestseller. Following on from The Searcher, it picks up two years after Cal Hooper arrived in Ardnakelty, and finds him in a position the first book spent its entire length denying him: settled. He has a relationship with Lena, a local woman who's been part of Ardnakelty her whole life. He has a cautious, hard-won place in the community. Most importantly, he has Trey - the teenager he took under his wing, who is slowly becoming someone with a future in front of her rather than just a past behind her.

Then a blazing summer heatwave descends on the village, and two men arrive with it. One is Johnny Reddy: Trey's long-absent father, charming, feckless, back in Ardnakelty after years away with no explanation and enormous plans. The other is Rushborough, an English millionaire Johnny has convinced that there's gold in the local river. The scheme - get the community to invest, then find the gold everyone will suddenly be expecting - requires the townspeople's trust. Johnny, who grew up here, is good at getting trust. What nobody in the village has fully calculated is that Rushborough is not quite who he presents himself to be, and that Trey, who has every reason to want her father to leave, has her own ideas about how to make that happen.

French significantly expands the novel's Multiple POV here compared to the single Cal perspective of The Searcher - Trey and Lena each get their own chapters, and the effect is to deepen both women considerably. Trey's chapters in particular carry the novel's real emotional charge: she is now fifteen, more grounded than the skittish twelve-year-old Cal first encountered, and the Coming of Age she's been moving through across both books sharpens here into genuine moral complexity. She wants to protect her mother and siblings. She also wants to make her father pay for Brendan. Those two desires are not entirely compatible, and French gives her no clean way through.

The Found Family at the novel's centre - Cal, Lena, and Trey, operating as an improvised unit around a crisis none of them chose - is the series' deepest strength, and its vulnerability. The arrival of Johnny forces all three of them to define what they're willing to do to protect each other, and the Family Legacy he represents for Trey - the man whose leaving shaped everything about how she's grown up - gives the Deception at the centre of the gold scheme a personal dimension that transforms it from a rural con into something with real moral stakes.

The Dark Secrets that the Small Town with Dark Underbelly of Ardnakelty has been carrying - the things everyone knew and nobody said - surface as the summer pressure builds, and the Murder Mystery proper arrives late in the novel, far past the point where most conventional thrillers would have staged it. That's deliberate. French's focus is on the conditions that make murder possible in this community rather than on the mechanics of whodunit, and the Mystery and Secrets Revealed in the final third reframes everything that's come before with the kind of moral seriousness that consistently sets her work apart.

The pacing carries the same patient, atmospheric quality as its predecessor - readers who struggled with The Searcher's slowness will find a similar register here. Those who found their way into Ardnakelty's rhythms, though, will find this a richer, more emotionally complex return visit, and the higher Goodreads rating reflects the consensus: for readers already invested, this is the series deepening into something special.