Oh, there are detectives, and they arrive equipped with all the surface bonhomie and dangerous, not to say feral, undertones that we are used to in a French novel. Here’s a things-go-bad story Thomas Hardy could have written in his prime, although the Hardy version would probably contain no lines such as “I looked like the lowlife in a zombie movie who isn’t going to make it past the first half-hour.”įrench has eschewed her popular Dublin Murder Squad series here to write a stand-alone novel, and as often happens, her work - never dull to begin with - has gained a certain lively freshness. That’s the first line of Tana French’s extraordinary new novel, “The Witch Elm,” and much of what follows is a meditation on luck - the good, the bad and the extremely ugly. “I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person.”
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