The Keeper Tana French (2026) With this novel, Tana French concludes her trilogy of mysteries set in the west country of Ireland—the previous novels are The Searcher and The Hunter, reviewed here. Former Chicago cop Cal Hooper is now well settled in his retirement cottage near the fictional village of Ardnakelty. He’s engaged to a local widow, Lena Dunne, and he crafts wooden furniture alongside an impoverished teenager, Trey Reddy, whom he’s taken under his wing. He doesn’t want to get involved in any more crimes. But when a young woman goes missing, he’s drawn into the search for her and then into the web of deceits that surround her. Gossip in rural Ireland is corrosive, and it can be manipulated either for evil ends or with good intentions, depending on who is doing the manipulating. As usual, French’s descriptive passages soar, thanks to her deep roots in the Irish landscape, both physical and emotional. You can feel the rain in the dim November days; you can sense the looming presence of the nearby mountains. People in 21st-century Ireland are well-connected to the Internet and keep abreast of global trends. Yet they also possess a relationship with each other and with the very soil under their feet that connects them to past centuries, to past millennia. Read this trilogy in order and savor every page.
The Lace Makers of Glenmara Heather Barbieri (2009) Within a couple of months, Kate Robinson has lost her mother and has been deserted by her long-term boyfriend. She decides to start over, leaving her freelance fashion-design work in Seattle for a backpacking tour of Ireland, the home of her ancestors. She happens to land in the fictional village of Glenmara and is taken in by a group of women who hand-craft lace—crocheted lace, bobbined lace, appliqued lace, all sorts of lace. Although Kate had planned to travel on to see the sights, she’s pulled into the fabric of Glenmara, and her stay leads to life changes both for her and for the Irish villagers. This book selection from a Little Free Library in my neighborhood turned out to be an easy one-day read, with charming descriptions of the west coast of Ireland.
Home Stretch Graham Norton (2020) In 1987 rural Ireland, a terrible single-car accident occurs, leaving three of the six passengers in the car dead and another paralyzed. Connor, one of the unharmed survivors, can’t stand the shame of having been the driver of the car. He takes off for Liverpool and then London, working as a laborer and deliberately losing touch with his family. He finally ends up in New York, drinking too much and finding his identity as a gay man. Through a chance encounter at a bar (“It’s a small gay world,” says one character), Connor reconnects with the people he left in Ireland, where repercussions of that car accident are still felt decades later. This novel is not so much a mystery—leading to a revelation about what really happened in that car crash—as it is an exploration of the power of family and of the changing attitudes toward homosexuality. For my review of Graham Norton’s novel Holding (2017) click here, and of his Frankie (2025) click here.