“The Keeper” by Tana French
In the third and final installment of her Cal Hooper trilogy, “the queen of Irish crime fiction” Tana French treats us to another immersive literary mystery.
Cal, a former Chicago detective, has begun to put down roots in a small Irish village. As he slowly builds ties to the community — mentoring a troubled girl whose father disappeared and establishing a future with a local woman — he begins to shed his outsider status.
But peace is disrupted with the discovery of a drowned young woman, fiancée to the son of the town’s wealthiest and most powerful man. The search for the truth behind her death fractures the fierce and tightly woven community, exposing enduring grudges, loyalties, and dark secrets. French once again probes questions of morality, consequence, and what defines justice.
Fans anxious for the arrival of “The Keeper” will also be sorry to see the trilogy end. The genre-bending thrillers are not only for people who read mysteries, and they do not require reading the previous books to appreciate the author’s introspective, high-quality prose. Newcomers can begin here — and will likely be tempted to return to the start for more.
“Transcription” by Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner’s highly regarded latest novel is a brief and peculiar, though thought-provoking, read. An unnamed narrator sent to interview his 90-year-old former mentor is left without a recording device after dropping his phone in the hotel sink. He fumbles his way (without calendar details, contact information, and GPS) to the meeting and decides to proceed with the interview while pretending to record it.
Told in three parts through a triangle of characters — the narrator, his subject Thomas, and Thomas’s son — Lerner’s novel drifts between past and present with dreamlike passages. It offers a timely assessment of our dependence on phones/technology and some of its modern-life ills — amplified anxieties and the fallacies of digital art. He examines and reflects on the larger theme of the unreliability of memory. After all, if nothing is recorded, what exactly is being “transcribed”?
“Villa Coco” by Andrew Sean Greer
In “Villa Coco,” out next month, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer (“Less”) returns with a leisurely adventure set in a sun-drenched villa in Tuscany. Geoffrey, a directionless young American, is hired by an elderly baroness as an archivist to catalogue her eclectic collection of art and artifacts. Instead, he becomes her all-purpose assistant — landscaping, entertaining her rotating troupe of colorful guests, and laboring through the olive harvest in sweltering heat. Greer populates the novel with a richly drawn cast of locals, expats, and drifters, capturing both the loneliness and the pleasures of living abroad. As Geoffrey settles into the rhythms of the crumbling villa, he forms friendships, explores love, and slowly begins to find himself in this comedy of manners and charming coming-of-age story.
“The Calamity Club” by Kathryn Stockett
Seventeen years after her blockbuster debut, “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s long-awaited new novel, “The Calamity Club,” is here. Stockett returns to Mississippi but further back in history — the 1930s in the Jim Crow South at the height of the Great Depression.
This time, she turns her attention to a disparate group of women — socialites and outcasts — whose lives intersect through an orphanage. Bound by secrets, scandal, and survival, they form an unexpected alliance, and reinvent themselves to find a way through hard times and societal constraints in pursuit of agency.
Stockett’s trademark observations of Southern identity, social nuance, and female friendships are evident here, particularly her keen portrayal of reputation and judgment in tightly bound communities. While the novel doesn’t quite match the emotional force of her debut, it offers a compelling portrait of female resilience, with some wit and insight into loyalty, betrayal, and the cost of belonging.
