Tana French is returning to bookstore shelves with a sequel to her most recent novel, Today.com reports.
Viking will publish the Irish mystery author’s The Hunter next year. The Penguin Random House imprint describes the book as “a spellbinding new novel set in the Irish countryside.”
The novel is a follow-up to French’s The Searcher, which Viking published in 2020. That book followed Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago police officer who moves to the west of Ireland and agrees to help Trey, a local teenager, investigate the disappearance of her brother. A critic for Kirkus said the novel offered “plenty of twists, shocking revelations, and truly chilling moments,” and called it “slow moving and richly layered.”
In The Hunter, Hooper has built an ad-hoc family with his new girlfriend and Trey. When Trey’s long-lost father reappears, she insists on exacting revenge on him. Viking says the novel is “a nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.”
French told Today.com that she hadn’t planned to write a sequel to The Searcher. “At the end of Searcher, I left Cal and Trey at a point where their relationship, and Cal’s relationship with the village, were just starting to find some kind of shape and solidity—but they were still fragile; there were still plenty of loose ends and shaky places,” she said. “I wanted to see what would happen if something came along to rock their balance, down the line.”
The Hunter is slated for publication on March 5, 2024.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
