D+

The Witch Elm

I’m a fan of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad books, so I was excited to see she was releasing a standalone mystery. To my disappointment, The Witch Elm has a great premise, but shaky execution.

The book opens with our narrator, Toby, going home after a night out with the lads. Toby is described as one of those guys who manages to navigate the stickiest of situations without suffering any consequences–case in point, he’s recently massively screwed up at work, and he’s probably going to walk away without so much as a reprimand. Toby goes back to his flat and wakes up from a half-drunk slumber to catch a burglary in progress. He tries to stop the intruders and suffers a terrible blow to the head in the process.

The next section of the book has Toby recovering from his traumatic brain injury while helping care for his uncle Hugo who is dying of cancer. Toby suffers from memory loss, among other things, as does Hugo, who has a brain tumor. During a family get-together, one of Toby’s nephews discovers a human skull under a witch elm in Hugo’s garden; a skull police link to a boy who went missing when he was in high school with Toby.

I love an unreliable narrator, and Toby is it. Either he, or Hugo, could reasonably have committed the murder and would be incapable of remembering it. Much of the book is Toby’s growing sense of unease as he struggles to recall his past.

The problem is, The Witch Elm takes forever to get going, and even then struggles to find it’s pace. We don’t get the skull-under-the-tree bit until almost a third of the way into the book. Much of the narrative is spent exploring Toby’s friends and family, and dissecting his past as a mediocre dude who succeeded in life due to his gender, economic status, and race. It feels like a book that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. When I got to the end of the mystery, it wasn’t satisfying. I felt like clues to the resolution hadn’t really been seeded throughout the plot.

I loved the premise of The Witch Elm, but the slow pacing and the amount of time Toby spends navel gazing kept me from fully enjoying the mystery.

– Elyse

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. 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. 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.

A 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.