The Witch Elm

Tana French’s The Witch Elm is a very different kind of crime novel — less about detectives chasing answers and more about a man stumbling into the wreckage of his own memory and privilege. The story follows Toby, a man who has always considered himself “lucky,” until a violent home invasion shatters his confidence and sense of self. In the aftermath, he retreats to his family’s ancestral home, Ivy House, only to find that the garden hides a human skull inside the trunk of an old elm tree. From there, the novel shifts its focus from solving the mystery of the skull to whether Toby can trust his own recollections of the past.

French takes her time here, lingering in Toby’s paranoia, the slipperiness of memory, and the small cruelties that ripple through families. It isn’t a fast-paced thriller but rather a psychological slow burn that asks how well we ever know ourselves, and what we might be capable of when the scaffolding of our lives is stripped away. The lush, almost Gothic atmosphere of the ivy-covered estate, with its elm tree at its center, creates an eerie backdrop for Toby’s unraveling.