Publication date: October 9, 2018
I have LOVED Tana French’s series of books featuring various characters from the Dublin Murder Squad, so when Penguin Group Viking and NetGalley provided me with the opportunity to read The Witch Elm in return for my honest review, I was ecstatic. It is a standalone novel, unrelated to the Dublin Murder Squad, so while I would have enjoyed seeing more of Antoinette Conway, Stephen Moran, and others, I REALLY enjoyed getting to know a whole new cast of characters.
The central character is Toby Hennessey, a millennial who has a great job doing PR for an art gallery, an amazing girlfriend named Melissa, and good friends including Sean and Declan. He also has a close family including his Uncle Hugo and cousins Susanna and Leon, all of whom figure prominently in the story. And one of the reasons I LOVE Tana French’s books is that I truly feel I KNOW these people (yes, for me they are people, not characters), and I care about them.
Toby is a happy-go-lucky guy leading a seemingly charmed life in Dublin, and he seems fairly self-aware as he notes “Me, cheerful oblivious Labrador of a guy, lolloping happily along with the flow…” His insight into his own good fortune is reflected in his view of his longtime friend Declan: “not that I was some charismatic leader type, but I was always effortlessly part of the cool crowd, invited to everything, secure enough in my footing that Dec had been accepted into the fold in spite of his accent and his glasses and his atrocious rugby skills and the chip on his shoulder, simply because he was my friend.”
As the story begins, Toby seems to have (as usual, according to family and friends) charmed his way out of what could have been an extremely bad situation at work. To celebrate, he and Sean and Dec go out for (way too many) drinks, then Toby heads for home. French’s descriptions of place are as effective as those of character, shown when Toby returns to his apartment building in Dublin, described as “the outside was sourly utilitarian and the corridors had the hallucinatory, liminal vibe of an airport hotel.” That night, Toby’s place is burglarized by two men who rob him, beat him savagely, and leave him for dead.
Following a lengthy hospital stay, Toby is struggling to recover both physically and mentally when his cousins Leon and Susanna encourage him to move in with their Uncle Hugo, who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness and is determined to live out his days at the family’s ancestral home. As Toby and Melissa settle in with Hugo, police detectives begin an investigation into a crime that occurred on the property ten or so years ago, back around the time Toby, Leon, and Susanna were all spending their entire summers at the house with Uncle Hugo.
Toby is having enough trouble just learning to adjust to his new reality of life following a traumatic brain injury, and he is aware he isn’t doing that well as he tries to present himself as a cooperative person to the detectives who are coming around the house – a LOT: “I was having trouble struggling up out of the Xanax, viscous fog dragging at my mind and my limbs, and the cops prowling the garden like a pack of feral dogs in the corner of my eye were more than I could handle.”
Toby’s memory problems compound his confusion about events from ten years earlier, and his drug use both then and now adds to the lack of clarity he has about either his past or his new reality. He becomes well aware that not only is he significantly changed as a result of his injury, he really doesn’t seem to have a solid grip on the reality of his past OR the fundamental question of what kind of person he has become.
The language is frequently colloquial, and I was grateful for my online dictionary more than once (gurning, numinous, and sgraffitoed, for example). Suspenseful, full of interesting people and enough plot twists and surprises to keep my husband asking “What’s wrong?” as I repeatedly voiced exclamations such as “Oh, no!” while I was reading. I couldn’t wait to find out what happened, and yet I didn’t want it to end. It is one of my favorite books of the year, for sure. Five stars.