He's an asshole, but it's not that because sometimes assholes can be interesting (I might want to rewrite that sentence later). And that's before we've got to Kennedy, Moran and the ferocious Antoinette Conway. I will probably never get over Frank and Rosie from Faithful Place. I shipped Rob and Cassie so hard in In the Woods, and Cassie herself made the implausible plot of The Likeness actually okay. The crimes are whatever the detectives - their voices, quirks, passions and personal histories - are what make her books so damn addictive. To start with, I feel like my love for French is centred around her awesome, snarky, flawed, messy, human detectives.

It's definitely not a bad book, but The Witch Elm - French's first standalone outside of her Dublin Murder Squad series - just didn't contain a lot of the stuff I've loved from this author. I keep trying to convince myself to bump this up a star because it's hard to believe Tana French can write anything that isn't amazing. I just knew I jinxed it by writing that first paragraph in my review of The Secret Place. American author Stephen King, in a review written for The New York Times, praised the novel as 'extraordinary'.I actually didn't love a Tana French book.

The novel received mostly positive reviews from critics. įrench was also motivated to write the novel due to an interest in exploring a crime from a perspective other than that of a detective, the primary viewpoint used in her Dublin Murder Squad novels. To accurately depict the protagonist's experience after a traumatic event, French conducted research about PTSD. French does not find true crime any more recent than the Bella case interesting, partially due to the ongoing impacts on living people caused by more recent crimes. French was also inspired by Bella in the Wych Elm, an unidentified woman found in a wych elm in Hagley in the 1940s. The novel is a standalone, not related to her Dublin Murder Squad novels.įrench was motivated to write the novel as an exploration of the connection between luck and an individual's ability to feel empathy for others. The Witch Elm (also published as The Wych Elm) is a 2018 novel by Tana French.

The witch elm synopsis