The Wych Elm by Tana French

When a character begins a novel telling you how lucky he is, this ought to ring alarm bells. The reader knows that luck can be ephemeral and that before too long something bad is going to happen.

In Tana French’s latest novel, The Wych Elm, the lucky guy telling the story is twenty-something Toby Hennessy and yes, he has it all: a great job, a beautiful girlfriend, plenty of friends and an easy charm. There’s even some family money which has helped him to buy his own flat.

As you’d expect, Toby’s luck soon starts to run out. Interrupting burglars, Toby is brutally attacked. The ensuing head injury leaves him with a limp, slurred speech and large gaps in his memory. Struggling to manage at home, Toby moves in with Uncle Hugo.

Hugo is like a parent to Toby, offering a home away from home for Toby and his cousins during long summer holidays when their parents went abroad. Now that Hugo has a brain tumour he needs someone around and the two can help each other.

Life starts to settle into a routine until a body is found in Hugo’s garden, more particularly, the skeleton of a young man who died ten years ago. Bit by bit, Toby and cousins, Susanna and Leon, recall their version of events and try to figure out who might have killed Dominic that summer.

But when your memory is unreliable, how can you be sure of your own innocence? Surprising facts come to light as the police close in. Could there be a connection between the attack on Toby at the start of the book and the crime from a decade before? Soon Toby is reminded that just because he’s lucky, doesn’t mean everyone is his friend.

The Wych Elm is a nicely-paced psychological thriller. The characters jump off the page, even when viewed through a muddled mind like Toby’s. The plot takes a few twists and turns - and so it should to keep you entertained through five hundred odd pages. But what I liked best was the voice of Toby telling the story – a deceptively chatty tone that still manages to be tense and brooding. It was a bit like reading The Catcher in the Rye crossed with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, only Irish.

Tana French is an award-winning crime novelist famous for her Dublin Murder Squad series. The standalone novel, The Wych Elm is her latest book.

Reviewed by JAM

Catalogue link:  The Wych Elm