With The Keeper, French concludes her trilogy about Cal Hooper, a former cop from Chicago who settles in a village in west Ireland, a place where young women find jobs in the city and old men worry about who will take over the farm.

The book begins when a body is fished out of the river; the death roils the vicious and tender emotional undercurrents that structure the life of any rural community. Not least because the victim was the fiancée of the scion of the local grandee. The latter is a businessman who has been buying up property for reasons that are uncertain but unlikely to bring anything good. (He is variously described as immobilizing, as a straitjacket, as a substrate in the soil under the town’s very walls: images like these imply that his superficial efforts at ingratiating himself with the people he’s grown up around hide something more ominous.) Hooper has never had much to do with the man, but now he finds himself unable to ignore or dismiss him. That’s because, although he’ll never be a local, Cal has forged ties to the place: surrogate father to a local teenager, a girl he has mentored from near-feral distrust to righteous confidence; partner to a middle-aged widow, a woman who wanted to get away from the place but never quite could; and friend to some of the guys down the pub, a gang led by his cantankerous neighbour, Mart. 

The lads’ banter is one of the books’ reliable pleasures, as is their depictions of dogs. French writes brilliantly about the relationships between dogs and people, at once attuned to each other and separate. Look at this beautiful sentence:

 Off in the distance, a man tramps steadily behind a wheelbarrow, his dog running in wide curves around him.

How vivid this picture, which pivots on the opposition of its verbs: the man “tramp[ing] steadily,” the dog “running in wide curves”; the man at work, the dog at play, two forms of aliveness; the one a line, the other a circle. French writes some of the most fully realized dogs in literature. They’re always bringing the offering of a sodden toy into a room charged with human argument, huffing as they roll over onto their other side in front of a fireplace, or questing off after the scent of a small creature they’ll never catch. 

The dogs are pure joy, but The Keeper, although as pleasurable as all the rest of French’s work, is a nervy book. When Mart asks Cal to look into the death, officially ruled a suicide, though the antifreeze in the victim’s system might suggest otherwise, Cal finds himself taking sides in what he didn’t realize was a conflict, a fight between differing visions of the town’s future. As always, French’s plotting is impeccable, but even back when she was writing her Dublin Murder Squad novels, she was always more interested in the challenges of living and working with others than in solving crimes. Her novels are populated by colleagues, neighbors, and mentors, categories that approach without ever quite assuming friendship. Think about the title. Does it refer to a gamekeeper? Someone who protects a place on behalf of someone else, someone more powerful? Or to the keeper of tradition? Or to a good boyfriend? (“He’s a keeper, that one.”) Cal could be taken to be any or all of these roles. But whatever the referent—and whoever fills it: I’ve been assuming Cal, but maybe I’m being too obvious—I think the term’s connotations are more ominous than protective. A terrific example of how crime fiction can chart its post-copaganda future, The Keeper will delight anyone who has exchanged their old life for a new one—or wanted to but never could.