But for a witness or a suspect or even the victim, these elements are going to look very intimidating - frightening and esoteric and mysterious. I started thinking about how, for the detective, all the procedural elements - the interrogation techniques, the forensic discovery - are really a source of power. Why did you decide you wanted to write from the perspective of someone who wasn’t a detective? Spoilers abound, so if you haven’t finished The Witch Elm yet, proceed with caution.

We also talked about her new book, the relationship between privilege and empathy, the unsettling timeliness of her latest subject, and why she didn’t resolve the mystery of In the Woods, even though she knew some fans would hate the ending. Recently, I spoke with French about her particularly eerie brand of red herrings.

The protagonist of The Witch Elm is an affluent white Dubliner named Toby who’s always been, in his own words, “basically, a lucky person.” The book is as much about Toby struggling to understand the nature of his own privilege as it is about the mysterious skull that turns up wedged inside the hollow trunk of a witch elm roughly a third of the way through the book. In her seventh, The Witch Elm, out this week to rave reviews, she breaks from her own convention by writing from the perspective of the victim of a crime.

A Dubliner who originally trained as a stage actor, her first six books were each narrated by a different detective from the fictional Dublin Murder Squad. Since bursting onto the mystery scene with her genre-bending 2007 debut In the Woods, Tana French has cemented her reputation as a literary novelist who happens to write about murder.

The witch elm review