Melissa, the girlfriend, sticks by him – she would – and believes he’s the same Toby as before the attack, but that’s not enough (and in fact his relationship with her has an unreal, idealised quality that doesn’t bode well). He’s suddenly a loser, a village idiot, whose personality, something he took for granted, has been ripped out from beneath him.Īlmost half the book is taken up with Toby’s changed circumstances and how he copes with being paranoid, terrified, “restless as a tweaker”. And he’s consumed with fear, “a ravenous, whirling black vortex”, that sucks him under. Even his previously happy relationship with his mother is affected. But now his speech is slurred, there’s weakness on his left side, his memory’s shot, he can’t find the right words for things. Toby no longer feels lucky, though his doctor keeps telling him that he is – he almost died from his head injuries. The detectives visit his bedside, of course, but they’re seen as an invasive nuisance. French takes us into new realms of pain, fear and the collapse of personality, with no police on hand to make order out of chaos, just a victim’s agony. When Toby’s brutally attacked in the night by burglars at his flat, everything changes.

And that business at the gallery – someone else got fired for it, while Toby’s insouciance won the day. It’s clear that one of those mates in the pub is infuriated by the way Toby’s wealthy parents support him, the way things fall into his lap, the way he’s oblivious to his own privilege. Toby’s voice is charming, though we soon get glimpses that not everyone is so enamoured. There’s been some unpleasantness at the gallery over a forgery matter, but Toby feels he’s come out on top. We’re completely under the spell of the narrator, Toby, a lucky, popular, easy-going young guy – “Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy” - who works in PR at a Dublin art gallery, has a lovely though rather too perfect girlfriend, and enjoys a few drinks in the pub with his best mates from school. The detectives are peripheral, with police procedurals taking place in the wings. And these murder squad detectives – the awful Quigley, the staunch Superintendant O’Kelly, the sparky Cassie Maddox and others – reappear over the series of six novels.īut The Wych Elm, her first stand-alone book, is different. Her Dublin Murder Squad series, with its detailed police procedurals, is addictively many-layered: in the chilling Broken Harbour, the collapse of the Irish housing boom forms a menacing backdrop to family crack-ups, a multiple murder and a detective who feels the presence of evil as a “high hum” in his skull in The Secret Place, a girls’ boarding school, with deadly cliques and brilliant teen terminology, takes centre stage.

The wych elm tana french