Book of the Day

From the review

A body in the river changes what a small town is willing to say out loud, and in Ardnakelty, nobody was saying much to begin with. Rachel Holohan was supposed to be getting engaged. Instead she's dead in the water, and the reasons fan out in every direction: old money, older grudges, a development scheme that's been slowly reordering who owns what. Tana French doesn't open on a body for shock value. She opens on it to prove that a town this small can't have a secret without everyone owning a piece of it. Cal Hooper, the retired Chicago cop who came to Ireland looking for quiet and got a second career in local trouble instead, is the reader's way in, but he's not fully inside anymore either. That's the sharpest thing French does with him here. Three books in, he's neither blow-in nor local, trusted enough to hear things and still foreign enough to be told only half of them. Every conversation in this book is a negotiation over how much truth a person actually owes their neighbor, and Cal keeps discovering the answer is less than he assumed. His detective instincts never fully retired either, and watching him try to keep them holstered, out of respect for people he now considers his own, adds a low hum of tension under every ordinary scene.