translated by Nick Caistor
and Lorenza Garcia
Revenge seems so simple in The Princess Bride when the fencer Inigo Montoya faces down his nemesis: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Montoya skewers the villain in a sword fight and—despite a profusely bleeding stomach wound—fulfills his destiny.
Vengeance proves to be more complicated in these three novels, one a Spanish thriller, the other two psychological murder mysteries focused on family tragedies. Revenge is served both hot and cold, and its motivations come in every shade of gray.
The would-be avenger in Irish writer Tana French’s The Hunter is a 15-year-old girl, Trey Reddy, from the (fictional) rural town of Ardnakelty. In its predecessor, The Searcher (2020), Trey’s older brother, a budding Walter White, is accidentally killed and his murder covered up by those involved. It’s now two years later, but Trey, who knows the gist of what happened, has not moved on. She’s sharpened her hatred to a fine point while appearing as normal as can be expected from the wild child of an outcast family abandoned by their father.
Cal Hooper, a former Chicago cop who had escaped to what he’d hoped would be the serenity and beauty of the Irish landscape, has learned the hard way that Ardnakelty is no picture postcard, but an inbred town that runs on gossip, grudges, and suspicion. Without intending to, he became a surrogate father to Trey, and as The Hunter begins, they’ve reached a comfortable stasis, hanging out at his place and repairing furniture together. Trey’s communication style is strictly need-to-know, so her conversations with Cal are amusingly terse, with French micro-analyzing every word, physical expression, and mood that passes between them.
In The Searcher, Cal seemed more an American archetype—the lone cowboy—than an actual person, but he’s filled out here and has settled in with a local girlfriend and a dog. Their fragile peace is disrupted by the return of Trey’s long-absent, ne’er-do-well father, Johnny, who ropes some local farmers into a scheme that involves convincing a wealthy Englishman that there’s gold to be found—and mined—in the town’s land. Cal signs on as a way of keeping tabs on Johnny and soon figures out who’s conning whom. Containing the damage is the best an outsider like Cal can do.
The Hunter takes its time setting up the ramifications of Johnny’s reappearance and getting to the bottom of his con game, but the many pleasures of French’s writing make it worthwhile. The ground is constantly shifting under these characters, and one of the few who can keep up is Cal’s neighbor Mart, a farmer whose goofy hats, wry twinkle, and amiable banter mask a calculating mind and a dark heart. His ideas about justice and vengeance are far more pragmatic—and compromised—than Trey’s.
The ground is constantly shifting under the characters in Tana French’s The Hunter.
When justice moves too slowly, the solution is sometimes D.I.Y., as it is in Australian writer Dervla McTiernan’s wrenching psychological thriller, What Happened to Nina? This narrative, told in the voices of its main characters, hinges on a David-versus-Goliath struggle in the aftermath of a traumatic event.
Vermont college student Nina Fraser goes on vacation with her longtime boyfriend Simon Jordan and doesn’t return. Unlike Nina, Simon comes from wealth. Simon’s story is that she dumped him for someone else during the vacation so he returned home, leaving her at his family’s vacation house in Stowe. But she’s not there, and she’s not answering her phone.
As the days tick down with no news, they know something bad has happened to her, and the police concur. Circumstantial evidence points to Simon, but the absence of a body stymies the investigation.
The question posed in the title is answered about halfway through the book, so the mystery is not the point. But that moment of discovery, handled chillingly by McTiernan, sets up the escalating family dispute that follows with grim clarity.
To protect their only child, Simon’s parents hire a “reputation management” firm to deploy a social-media campaign against the Fraser family. Outmatched and outspent, the Frasers can only stand by defenselessly as their lives collapse under the weight of false allegations.
But all the bots and trolls in cyberspace are nothing against a parent’s grief and rage. What Happened to Nina? unfolds like a Greek tragedy in the hills of Vermont, with an ending that is both inevitable and shocking.
Dervla McTiernan’s What Happened to Nina? hinges on a David-versus-Goliath struggle in the aftermath of a traumatic event.
As the only detective among this month’s avengers, Antonia Scott tries to be objective. She is Spain’s Red Queen, the centerpiece of a European Union–wide secret law-enforcement project made up of experts who operate outside normal boundaries for especially problematic cases. Antonia has been trained and psycho-engineered to be a forensic genius, but she’s also a tormented person who needs special drugs to keep the jungle full of monkeys in her brain quiet. She thinks about suicide almost as often as she blinks.
She first appeared in Juan Gómez-Jurado’s Red Queen (2023) teamed with Jon Gutiérrez, a massive, red-headed Basque police detective whose gayness—not a comfortable fit for a Spanish cop—is coupled with physical strength and an implacable antipathy to injustice. He understands Antonia like no one else and would lay down his life for her.
This curious duo is re-deployed in Black Wolf to track down Lola Voronin, the Spanish wife of a Russian gangster who’s been murdered in the Costa del Sol. She’s in the wind, having dodged an assassin’s bullet. Clearly, she’s a clever woman who is more involved in her husband’s business than her trophy-wife looks and shopping habit might indicate. When a container from Russia shows up at a Spanish port carrying the corpses of eight young women, the pressure is on Antonia and Jon to find her before she falls victim to the Black Wolf, a Russian hit woman who never misses.
After Antonia has inspected the decomposing bodies in the container, Jon senses a turning point in his partner’s attitude: “Compassion is a fog we can get lost in. Revenge comes from hatred, and hatred is tangible, something you can wield like a weapon.” Which she does.
Gómez-Jurado has hit on a winning formula with these books—they’re stylish, fast-paced, and funny, but underpinned by wisdom and humanity. His short sentences and paragraphs, translated with idiomatic flair by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, punch above their weight.
Try to read Red Queen and Black Wolf before watching the just-released Amazon Red Queen series. As good as the show might be, it can’t possibly be better than the books.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books at AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City