Practical Magic
The Keeper by Tana French (Viking, 2026)
Reviewed by Joel Harold Tannenbaum
The crime novelist Tana French has two extraordinary talents: She knows when a question doesn’t need to be answered, and she knows how to invoke the supernatural without relying upon it as a plot device. In her most memorable work, the two play off of each other to great effect, making French a modern master of the sublime.
This approach was on full display in her first six novels (collectively the Dublin Murder Squad series), which were full of disappearances, dopplegängers and, of course, violent deaths. Some of them are ultimately explained by all-too-human traits like jealousy and avarice. Others are not explained at all. These tendencies continue in The Witch Elm, her sole standalone novel to date. In The Keeper, her latest, they reach new heights.
The Keeper is the third and final installment in a series that began in 2020 when French debuted a new character and a new setting, shifting focus from greater Dublin to rural Ireland. The Searcher and The Hunter follow an American, Cal Hooper, as he attempts to begin a new life in the fictional village of Ardnakelty and is slowly, ineluctably drawn into its feuds and secrets.
Hooper arrives in Ireland fleeing a failed marriage, a fraught relationship with his grown daughter, and some angst related to his former life as a Chicago cop. He’s come to Ardnakelty to lay low, much like boxer Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man. Yet some drama is inevitable, we learn, because he is the proverbial man’s-gotta-have-a-code type (French has stated that the character was inspired by John Ford westerns). Ardnakelty, meanwhile, is marked by a wobbly equilibrium: As in much of real-life rural Ireland, primogeniture still rules, meaning that farms get passed down to oldest sons, creating a strong incentive for others to leave. Many of them–especially the young, especially women–do so at the earliest opportunity.
Thus, when Cal lands in 21st century Ardnakelty he finds himself among a smallholding class of aging bachelors who spend their days shearing sheep and fending off real estate developers, and their evenings in a decrepit pub. Alongside them are a handful of small business owners. Below them are the landless unfortunates who have not mustered the emotional or material resources to move to Dublin, or to emigrate.
Police are not trusted. Conflicts, of which there are many, are handled strictly off-book. The local farmers embrace Hooper–sort of, as a curiosity–but his inability to let an injustice stand inevitably disrupts the aforementioned equilibrium, leading to trouble. In the series’ first novel, The Searcher, that trouble takes the form of a teenager desperate to track down her missing brother. In The Hunter, it’s that same teenager’s deadbeat father, who returns from exile with a charismatic con artist in tow. Along the way, French evokes in her signature manner. Bogs feel like simmering alien landscapes, and not just when bodies turn up in them. Famine cottages feel like haunted houses. Rooks (a variety of crow) tease, taunt, and harass like a particularly aggressive Greek chorus. French renders an act of arson that turns into a wildfire with an abandon that resembles Dante describing the sixth circle of hell.
Ardnakelty’s feudal class structure is both present and felt in The Searcher and The Hunter but does not necessarily drive the story. This changes in The Keeper, which begins with the death of Rachel, a young woman who happens to have been engaged to the son of a local factory owner, Tommy. When Hooper reluctantly begins to press against the village consensus that the death was a suicide, Tommy presses back in ways that threaten Hooper’s now fairly deep roots in the village. He has a fiancée, Lena, and an informally fostered daughter, Trey, both born and raised in Ardnakelty. Both have benefitted from having Hooper in their lives, and both have provided critical protection at moments throughout the series when he has underestimated the town’s collective immune system against outside interference: Gossip is weaponized in Ardnakelty, and often a precursor to real physical danger.
Tommy, we learn, has big plans for Ardnakelty’s farmlands. These plans put him at odds with its remaining farmers. As the investigations into Rachel’s death begin to reveal more about those plans, the village begins to roil. Tommy has spent his political capital well, and dispensed his patronage smartly. There is little anyone can do to oppose him. There is something distinctly lord-like about Tommy–in the worst sense–and something distinctly medieval about the methods the villagers must resort to express their displeasure. Cal, no fan of Tommy, finds himself caught in the crossfire, and the tools that Tommy has at his disposal to make Hooper’s life difficult–along with Lena’s and Trey’s–are considerable.
The search in The Searchers is for Trey’s missing brother, or perhaps it is Hooper’s search for a place to be where his life will mean something. The namesake in The Hunter could be Trey, or her father, each seeking vengeance against the village, for different reasons and by different methods. Or perhaps it is Hooper, who reveals a previously unseen level of viciousness when the people he cares about are threatened. The thing worth keeping in The Keeper is the life Hooper has built in this strange, forgotten place, or, perhaps from Ardnakelty’s perspective, the thing worth keeping is Hooper himself. The mystery remaining at the end of this excellent series of novels is where Tana French will choose to turn her penetrating gaze next.
Joel Harold Tannenbaum chairs the Humanities Department at Community College of Philadelphia. He occasionally finds time to write about the history of food and food science in journals like Gastronomica and Petit Propos Culinaires.
