The Wych Elm

The Wych Elm by Tana French

Published by Viking

February 2019

One night changes everything for Toby. He's always led a charmed life - until a brutal attack leaves him damaged and traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at his family's ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins.

But not long after Toby's arrival, a discovery is made: a skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden.

As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and himself.

A spellbinding standalone from a literary writer who turns the crime genre inside out, The Wych Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, if we no longer know who we are.

The Wych Elm (or Witch if you are in the States) is the new stand-alone crime novel by Tana French.  Now I'll get my niggles out of the way instantly - the chapters are exhaustingly long, if like me you cannot stop reading in the middle of one, and secondly I hated the central character Toby.  Aside from all of that, I did enjoy this book so please read on!

Toby is a self-centred so-and-so and the sort of person that everything goes right for - he can talk his way out of anything and has had a lifetime of things falling into his lap; lucky boy.  He works for an art gallery and they decide to have an exhibition that is going to bring a lot of publicity their way, however things go wrong, Toby gets into trouble at work and then to top it all off, his flat gets burgled and he ends up in a very serious way in the local hospital as a result.  He needs to recuperate and his family decide that the best thing for him to do would be to return to the Ivy House, home of his uncle Hugo who is sadly dying.  Toby is now a former shadow of himself but could be the ideal companion for his uncle in his final months of life.  

Toby goes to stay with Uncle Hugo, and takes his girlfriend Melissa along with him.  He spends a lot of time reminiscing with his cousins Susannah and Leon and the whole family get together every Sunday for a big lunch.  It is at one of these lunches that Susannah's children discover a skull hidden in the Wych Elm at the bottom of the garden.  As luck would have it, or not in this case, the skull turns out to be human which prompts a visit from the local constabulary and a murder case is opened when it is revealed that the skull belongs to an old school friend of Toby and his cousins who was at the time, rumoured to have committed suicide before they all departed for university.

Now Toby is at the forefront of two mysteries - that of the skull in the garden and also of who tried to kill him when the burglary on his flat went wrong.  Is there a connection?  Tana French clearly shows that you can choose your friends but you certainly cannot chose your family.  Do you even really know them as well as you think you do, and when push comes to shove, do they even have your back at all?  It is certainly a novel about relationships more than anything and makes for interesting reading in that respect.  This is the sort of novel that could strike up some interesting conversations in a book group.

Happy Reading

Miss Chapters x