Maureen Corrigan

The Keeper is the closer to Tana French's magnificent series of crime novels set in the west of Ireland and featuring retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper.

I don't ordinarily review novels that conclude a series because the power of a finale derives from all that's come before.

But if you're game to read the first two Cal Hooper books, or if you're already a fan, know that The Keeper solidifies this series' status as a contemporary classic.

By now, after reckoning with local gangs, drug dealers, and con artists, Cal has lost much of his innocence about the quaint village of Ardna Kelty, his adoptive home.

He knows that evil can fester under shamrocks as abundantly as it does on city streets.

In this finale, however, it's not so much the victims of crime who need Cal's protection, but the land itself.

Ardna Kelty's pristine beauty is under threat from the machinations of a developer with political connections.

French, who's already proven herself to be an exquisite nature writer, on par with the likes of Norman Maclean and Annie Dillard, has the chops to render Cal's final rescue mission an epic environmental one.

The Keeper opens at the local town shop, where we're told Cal would expect to get wind of trouble, from pregnancy to potato blight.

As he's buying eggs and chatting with Noreen the proprietor, in comes Tommy Moynihan, striding into the shop like he's walking into a merger meeting.

Here's more of that introduction to this Hale fellow well-met.

Tommy is some kind of big shot in the meat processing plant over towards Kilhone.

He's got a farmer's solid bulk, a politician's frozen silver hair, a C-list cattle baron's ranch house, a Range Rover the size of a buffalo, and an annual family holiday to Mexico.

Cal dislikes Tommy.

Tommy's son, a smarmy Nepo baby named Eugene, is about to propose to a sweet local girl named Rachel when she goes missing and is later found dead in the river.

The guards, the Irish police, are called in, but the town conducts its own parallel investigation via rumor into whether Rachel's death is an accident, suicide, or murder.

Meanwhile, Cal learns that large parcels of farmland around Ardna Kelty are being bought up.

Housing estates, factories, data centers, who knows what's in store?

I'll leave the plot summary there, except to say that in unexpected but satisfying ways, these two major storylines converge.

The wonder of French's style is that her novels unfold almost exclusively through conversations in which she conveys the deeper messages lurking inside everyday speech.