Talking to Tana French

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The Irish mystery writer Tana French is best known for her Dublin Murder Squad series of crime novels, each of which focuses on a different member of the titular police force to build a psychologically textured portrait of a troubled city and its inhabitants. But French has also written stand-alone novels, and in her most recent book she revisits one of those in what may be the start of a new series: “The Hunter” is a sequel to 2020’s “The Searcher,” which introduced readers to the character of Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who relocated to a rural Irish village and got involved in a missing-persons case.

In “The Hunter,” French widens the circle to look at Cal’s family and life he’s built for himself during his two years in Ireland. It’s a new approach for her, she tells Sarah Lyall on this week’s episode:

“I’ve never done that before, focused on the same character twice,” she says. “So I did want to come back to Cal to an extent, because I think he’s an interesting character for me. He’s one of the few main characters I’ve written who are very much about action, rather than introspection. He’s very focused on what he does. He doesn’t think that what you think matters, it’s all about what you do. And because of that I found him interesting to write, and I thought he was an interesting mix this time around, with Lena and Trey, who see things very differently.”

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