Novelist Tana French, pictured in 2019 in Dublin.Kim Haughton
Tana French said recently that many of the problems of a society fit into a crime novel, like it or not. Repeatedly, we see that the genre is filled with books that use this and other resources with artifice. However, with French everything is coupled in stories that go beyond the most classic police, the social story, the psychological novel, literary devices perfectly armed to transcend the black genre, in which, even so, they move with comfort. The regular reader of the American author, based in Ireland, will find in
El explorador
(AdN, translation by Julia Osuna) part of the keys to the literary and commercial success of the series of novels set in the Dublin homicide squad (closed, for the moment, with the excellent
Intrusion
), but, as he did in
The Secret of the Elm
(a superb
psychological
thriller
), here's a twist.
Cal Hooper is a retired American policeman who decides to retire to a remote town in Ireland. Seek peace after a divorce and 25 years kicking the streets of Chicago. The place may seem quaint to a clueless tourist, but Cal soon discovers that it has the filias, hates, and secrets of any small community. The procedural comes from the hand of a boy from an unstructured family who turns to him to look for his brother, who disappeared under strange circumstances. From there, with patience and skill, French superimposes narrative layers: here a bit of mystery, there some initiatory history, on this side an air of a wéstern with a living room included, in this case a pub, and his cowboy, who he even buys a Henry, a classic shotgun from the American Wild West.
The moral conflict, always present in French, is left here for the final part, when the hero, tired and clinging to his code, assumes that what is fair, what is legal and what he ends up doing because he believes that it is the closest thing to the right thing. do not match.
For so many ingredients to work, you need literary mortar, and French has plenty to build, once again, a true crime novel.
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Look for it at your nearest bookstore
THE EXPLORER
Author:
Tana French
Translator:
Julia Osuna
Editorial:
AdN, 2021.
Format:
paperback with flaps (464 pages, 19 euros).
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