Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of March.

I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the co-hosts of Slate Political GabFest.

I am here today with Tana French.

Hi, Tana.

Hi, Emily.

Thank you so much for having me.

I am so excited that you're here.

So fans of Tana French, me among them, hold their breath for the moment when a new

Tana French novel appears. And we are here to talk about the Hunter, which is Tana's ninth book.

This is a book that delivers all of the pleasures, I think, that Tana French is known for.

It's a suspense novel. It has a detective story at the heart

that is a page turner. It has memorable characters. Cal Hooper and Trey Reddy are back from

Tana's last book, The Searcher. And also returning are the village and community of farms and

mountain dwellings of Ardna Kelty in Western Ireland.

In many of your novels, Tana, there's a social issue of our times that's kind of in the background.

It's not pushing the narrative forward, but it's affecting what happens and how the characters are feeling.

And I think this time the issue that at least

leaped out to me was climate change, because there is a very hot summer happening as the story

unfolds. And this is the second novel you've written about Cal Hooper, who is a former cop from

Chicago, and he moved to the Irish countryside in search of a kind of escape from Chicago, but the community he found is not an idyllic one.

I really like how it is portrayed in all of its sometimes Machiavellian complexity.

So you live in Dublin, I know, and you are best known for several books you wrote about

...