by Tana French, 2020, Audiobook narrated by Roger Clark, Penguin Audio

This book seemed like it was going to be really good, but as I got into it, it turned out to be just okay for me.

The book is about a police officer from Chicago who retires from his job and relocates to a remote community in Ireland. He buys an abandoned house that he proceeds to fix up. While he is working on it, he notices that someone is watching him. He encounters this person who seems to be a boy about thirteen who is rather dirty and definately has an attitude. He gradually gets the boy (who later turns out to be a girl) to open up and finds that his (her) brother is missing and wants someone to find out what happened to him.

I listened to the audiobook and the narrator does a great job of portraying the Irish characters. His portrayal of the main American character, however, is a bitt rough and I didn’t like it as much. There is some great Irish dialogue which I enjoyed.

The search for the missing brother and the outcome, however, is not very compelling. The story is better for the characters and their stories than the main plot of the book.

We listened to James Joyce’s short stories in The Dubliners, and my disappointment was that Joyce ended his stories too abruptly in my opinion; we never found out what happened. This certainly was not the case in The Searcher. After the mystery was solved there is a much of the book before it finally ended..