The author has branched out with the twisty, psychological thriller The Wych Elm. She shares her conversations with a retired detective and why she’s not interested in true crime
Tana French ducks out of the rain and into an Italian restaurant in the villagey Dublin suburb of Sandymount, looking a little like a mischievous sprite: cap on her head, a crush of vintage and contemporary badges pinned to her bag, a big, open smile. Of Russian, Italian, American and Irish heritage, she orders a cappuccino in the relevant language, though declares herself far fonder of the Leinster damp than the sweltering heat of Rome, where she lived before this latest, decades-long stint in Ireland.
We’re here to talk about the former actor’s seventh novel, The Wych Elm, a twisty psychological thriller that has been likened to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History – and her first to stand apart from her Dublin Murder Squad series. When it came out in the US last October (as The Witch Elm, presumably because the tree in question is European and thus unfamiliar to her Stateside readership), Stephen King took to the New York Times to pronounce it extraordinary, and to invoke the names of Thomas Hardy, James Ellroy and Ruth Rendell: “The prose, as fine as it is, as dense as it is, as obsessive as it is, remains in service to the story. This is good work by a good writer. For the reader, what luck.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DNewFr
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