Welcome to Gabfest reads for the month of March. I'm Emily Bazlan, one of the co-host 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 Searchers.

And also returning are the village and community of farms and mountain dwellings of Ardena-Kelti 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

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

...