![]() ![]() Now, with The Wych Elm (retitled The Witch Elm for American readers who (1) don’t know what kind of tree a wych elm is, and (2) couldn’t be bothered to find out about the famous 1943 discovery in Hagley Wood, Worcestershire, we are given a stand-alone from the ‘Dublin Murder Squad’ – though we still have to endure detectives of the Kennedy and Conway class (one of whom meets a fate I’d wish on Kennedy or Conway). The Secret Place gives us four marvellously appealing schoolgirls, especially Frank’s daughter Holly, but also the odious detective Antoinette Conway, a potty-mouthed female of the ‘Scorcher’ species who reappears in The Trespasser. Broken Harbour featured the almost clownishly inept detective ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy whose method of getting a ‘solve’ is to apply a ‘template’ to identify the most likely suspect, arrest him on no evidence and try to browbeat a confession. Frank Mackey in Faithful Place is a subtle creation, but his blood relations mostly a collection of lower-class Irish stereotypes with his mother the worst sort of superstitious Mother MacCree given to ‘Holy Family of God’ exclamations and his father a revolting and pitiable alcoholic and minor criminal. ![]() But her subsequent offerings have betrayed a steadily coarsening and shrinking imagination. ![]() ![]() With The Likeness, Tana French cemented a place in my top three favourite authors, along with Sharon Bolton and Elizabeth Haynes. ![]()
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