A publicist for a Dublin art gallery, he has a girlfriend so saintly that it takes a while for her to register as a real character (or at least for him to see her that way). He's attractive, clever, and universally liked. Who might we become if the privileges we take for granted were suddenly ripped away?, Instead of a world-weary detective, our narrator is Toby, an easygoing 20-something who has always taken his wild good fortune as a matter of course. But in this latest work, privilege is French's subject more specifically, the relationship between privilege and what we perceive as luck. In theme and atmosphere, it evokes her earliest two books, Into the Woods and The Likeness, using the driving mystery of course, there's a murder as a vehicle for asking complex questions about identity and human nature.
It's as good as the best of those novels, if not better. Reviewed by Julie Buntin, The Witch Elm is Tana French's first standalone, following six Dublin Murder Squad mysteries.
Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden-and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.Ī spellbinding standalone from one of the best suspense writers working today, The Witch Elm asks what we become, and what we’re capable of, when we no longer know who we are. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family’s ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who’s dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life-he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. “Tana French’s best and most intricately nuanced novel yet.” - The New York TimesĪn “extraordinary” (Stephen King) and “mesmerizing” ( LA Times) new standalone novel from the master of crime and suspense and author of the forthcoming novel The Searcher.įrom the writer who “inspires cultic devotion in readers” ( The New Yorker) and has been called “incandescent” by Stephen King, “absolutely mesmerizing” by Gillian Flynn, and “unputdownable” ( People) comes a gripping new novel that turns a crime story inside out. Named a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, The New York Times Book Review, Amazon, The Boston Globe, LitHub, Vulture, Slate, Elle, Vox, and Electric Literature
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