With cunning psychological prowess, Tana French's first standalone crime novel after six Dublin Murder Squad mysteries plumbs the recesses of our darkest thoughts.

In Dublin, on an almost-Halloween evening, Toby Hennessy, his girlfriend and his cousins are hanging out at Ivy House, Uncle Hugo's grand abode, asking each other, "What's the worst thing you ever did?" The game is a way of tiptoeing around how each of them may be connected to the discovery of a skull in the wych elm tree in the Ivy House garden.

The macabre discovery is not the only recent misfortune in the Hennessy family. Uncle Hugo has a brain tumor, and Toby nearly dies when he's attacked in his flat, possibly in connection to a scandal at the art gallery where he works. The plot surrounding the skull comes into focus through Toby's murky lens of pain, frustration and the medications required after this tragic combination of events. Toby has always been lucky, a handsome charmer who can talk his way out of scrapes and befriend just about anyone. But who is he if his luck has run out?

French rips open the chasm between Toby's before and after, viscerally describing his fear as "dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep." Add to Toby's troubles his worried girlfriend and sensitive, conniving cousins, and it becomes apparent that The Witch Elm is about more than the crime behind the skull; it is about what happens when a great upheaval cracks open life's shell and reveals one's true potential.

With this thorough search into the criminal mind, French reaffirms her place as one of our finest crime novelists. Her characters become as familiar as family yet as unpredictable as strangers, creating a chilling sense that everything could shift at any time.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this stand-alone from the multi-award-winning French, easygoing Toby encounters two burglars when returning home from a celebratory night out and is left for dead after a severe beating. Recovering at his ancestral home sounds like a good idea, if it weren't for the skull found in the garden's elm.

This first stand-alone novel by French ("Dublin Murder Squad" series) features personable Dubliner Toby. Toby does social media work for an art gallery, maintains close relationships with his cousins Leon and Susanna, and has loose plans to marry girlfriend Melissa. Then one night, two burglers in his apartment beat him senseless and leave him for dead. Struggling mentally and physically, Toby is unable to continue working or living on his own, so he and Melissa move in with his Uncle Hugo, who is in the late stages of brain cancer. When a skeleton found in a tree in the backyard is identified as a high school friend of Toby's, long-held secrets bubble just below the surface. But with Toby's memory problems, he can't be sure how much he knows about Dominic, his death, or any of the people in his life—including himself. VERDICT French's slow-burning, character-driven examination of male privilege is timely, sharp, and meticulously crafted. Recommended for her legions of fans, as well as any readers of literary crime fiction.—Stephanie Klose, Library Journal

Reviewed by Julie Buntin

The Witch Elm is Tana French's first standalone, following five Dublin Murder Squad mysteries. It's as good as the best of those novels, if not better. 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. But in this latest work, privilege is French's subject; more specifically, the relationship between privilege and what we perceive as luck. 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. He's attractive, clever, and universally liked. 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). Then robbers break into his apartment and beat him so badly that the physical damage permeates every aspect of his life, fundamentally altering his appearance, his gait, and his sense of self. His memory is newly riddled with gaps; his frustration as he attempts to discern what's real, what's remembered, and what's paranoia adds fuel to the plot. While he's in the hospital, his beloved Uncle Hugo, keeper of the Ivy House, a family property that's rendered with French's signature attention to real estate, is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Toby moves in with him, both to keep him company and because he, too, needs a caretaker.

When a human skull turns up in a hollow of a witch elm in the backyard of the Ivy House, the plot revs its engine. Who does the skull belong to? And what does Toby have to do with whoever died in his backyard, or at least who was buried there? In typical French fashion, just when you think you've started to piece it all together, the picture shifts before your eyes. It's a bold move to wait until nearly a third of the way into the book to deploy the body. But what might seem like throat-clearing in another writer's novel is taut and tense in The Witch Elm, thanks to a layered network of subplots and the increasing fragmentation of Toby himself. In many ways, the most interesting question the novel asks is not whodunit; it's whether, and how, Toby will come back together again.

Stepping outside the restrictions of the Dublin Murder Squad format suits French. Readers used to the detective's perspective might miss the shop talk, not to mention the pleasure of inhabiting the POV of the smartest character rather than (in this case) the most bewildered. By channeling the story through a narrator who's unfamiliar with the very worst parts of human nature, she's able to put her thematic questions at center stage . She carefully builds Toby up, and then strips every part of him away; the result is a chilling interrogation of privilege and the transformative effects of trauma.

Julie Buntin is the author of Marlena, a novel.