Free Audiobook : Calico, By Lee Goldberg
8 March 2024
Free Audiobook : The Searcher, By Tana French
10 March 2024
Audiobook details
Two years of quiet, and then Johnny Reddy came back
Two years after Cal Hooper arrived in Ardnakelty, the rhythm of village life suits him better than he expected. He has a relationship with Lena Dunne, and Trey Reddy, the teenager who pulled him into trouble the first time around, is steadying into someone going somewhere. It is not the blank retirement Cal imagined, but it is close enough. Then Trey's father shows up.
Johnny Reddy does not come alone. With him is Cillian Rushborough, an English millionaire who claims family ties to the area and who has a scheme: there is gold in the local mountains, and the village can profit. Cal, who spent years working fraud cases in Chicago, recognizes what he is looking at. What he cannot work out is why Trey, who has every reason to distrust her father, seems ready to go along with it. What she wants, it turns out, is not what Cal thinks she wants.
French builds the second Cal Hooper novel around the cost of belonging and the limits of protection. The summer turns dangerous in ways that resist easy tracing, and Roger Clark narrates across 16 hours and 24 minutes with the same ground-level attention he brought to The Searcher, returning to Ardnakelty as someone who knows where the bodies, emotional and otherwise, are likely to be buried.
I went in with some skepticism. The Searcher worked precisely because it was contained: one man in a village he could not read, running an investigation nobody asked him to run. Sequels to that kind of novel tend to add plot machinery that dilutes the atmosphere. The Hunter does not do that. Johnny Reddy arrives in Ardnakelty with Cillian Rushborough and a gold scheme, and the tension French builds is less about whether the scheme is a fraud than about what Trey plans to do with her father now that she finally has him within reach.
French is careful with how she handles the village this time. In The Searcher, Cal saw Ardnakelty from the outside and kept misreading it. In The Hunter, he belongs, at least partially, and that belonging does not give him the power to stop anything. The gold scheme works through the community's own wants, and the damage it causes is specific to each person who chooses to participate. There is no single point of failure to address.
Trey at fifteen is the hardest character in the book and the best written. She has her own account of what her father owes her, and Cal cannot argue her out of it, because the account is not unreasonable. The Hunter gives her a revenge thread that does not resolve in a way that feels either satisfying or unjust, but rather in a way that feels true. I found that harder to sit with than a cleaner ending would have been.
The pacing is slower than the marketing copy suggests. The official description uses the word blazing to set expectations for speed and heat, and the novel delivers the heat but not the speed. French is interested in the space between recognizing something is wrong and deciding to act. The book spends considerable time in that space, and it earns every minute of it.
Roger Clark returns as Cal, and the 16 hours and 24 minutes confirm the fit. He is notably different playing Trey than he is playing Cal, which matters because the novel's tension lives in the gap between two people who care about each other making choices the other cannot accept. As the summer darkens, the shift in his delivery is careful and earned.
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The Hunter by Tana French is the sequel to The Searcher, set two years later in the same village of Ardnakelty where Cal Hooper finally found something close to peace. That peace ends when Trey's long-absent father Johnny returns with an English millionaire named Cillian Rushborough and a scheme to mine gold from the local mountains. Cal, who spent years working fraud cases in Chicago, reads the situation immediately. Trey, who has been waiting two years for her father to come back, does not want to hear it.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, to hear Roger Clark narrate this 16 hrs and 24 mins audiobook. Clark voiced Cal through the entirety of The Searcher and returns here with the same unhurried precision, adjusting his delivery as the blazing summer turns in directions that no amount of heat can explain.
The audiobook stays yours permanently, even if you cancel before the trial ends. The free trial also opens up thousands of other titles at no extra cost. Start listening now.
US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
