Title:	The Hunter
	Author:	Tana French
	Published:
	No. of Pages:	432
	Cover Price:	$13.99 Kindle

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The Hunter, by bestselling and multi-award winning author Tana French is set in a very rural part of Ireland, where the residents are mostly hardworking farmers. Cal Hooper (a retired policeman from Chicago) is a carpenter who specializes in fixing his neighbors’ broken furniture, and has taught a 15-year old girl, Trey Reddy, the skills. Trey’s father left her mother and her siblings four years prior, and suddenly returns with a millionaire insisting that there is gold in their community and proposes a project to dig it up. Several of the residents are ready to turn over their savings to invest in the project when a murder occurs and Trey is set on revenge after her brother’s disappearance. The plot and sub-plots are dark and complicated, and readers will need to pay attention to follow the numerous scenarios.

French is an excellent storyteller, and weaves a tale that is made unique because she captures the culture and ambience of rural Ireland so that readers will feel like they are right in the rural town. French also does an excellent job of developing the characters. Cal and Trey seem to be co-protagonists and have their own problems to deal with. French’s characters use profanity in the form of the F-word to show that her characters are low class people, “trailer trash” if you will. They are also smokers which emphasizes the scummy state of these people. The problem is that the profanity is used way too much, and most respectable readers won’t be comfortable with it; the profanity is really unnecessary. This also reduces the number of readers who should read the book, eliminating young adult and teen readers where it’s not appropriate for them to read.

All told, this is a good novel with a good story made unreadable because of profanity. It could be a good novel for readers who aren’t made uncomfortable with the overuse of the unnecessary profanity.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.