Toby's cousins Susanna and Leon also treat Ivy House as a second home, with Susanna's husband and young children as well as Leon's current boyfriend rounding out the menagerie. The survivor of a sad family of origin, she admires the way Toby's uncle cares for his brothers and their wives as well as their children.
When Uncle Hugo suggests Toby spend his convalescence at Ivy House, his girlfriend Melissa is thrilled. Toby Hennessy - star of Tana French's new standalone novel The Witch Elm - is a man in his late twenties who has a loving girlfriend, a good job, excellent friends, and a close-knit family that often congregates at Ivy House, once the home of his grandparents and now inhabited solely by his bachelor Uncle Hugo.īut before we meet Toby, he's been violently assaulted in his apartment, left for dead, and awoken in the hospital to discover that he'll not only need a few weeks to recuperate, but he'll suffer from crippling PTSD. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. In the process of searching for Brendan, Cal ferrets out a bog’s worth of secrets and sins festering beneath this quaint patch of the Auld Sod.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Witch Elm Author Tana French So it is that Cal, despite his reluctance, gets drawn into the case - as we readers know he will - because that’s what makes these quiet men who preside over Westerns and detective novels the flawed heroes they are. The local police have been useless, prejudiced, as they are, against the entire Reddy family as a pack of lazy troublemakers.
(Everyone in the nearest village has sussed out by Celtic telepathy that the American-who-bought-the-cottage is an ex-cop.) Eventually, Trey confesses the real reason he’s been hanging around: He wants Cal to find out what happened to his beloved 19-year-old brother, Brendan, who vanished from the family cottage months ago. One thing Trey doesn’t need to learn is that Cal is an ex-cop. Before long, Trey is coming around regularly to help Cal and to learn carpentry.
When Cal corners the voyeur, he turns out to be a wayward adolescent named Trey Reddy, who lives on a nearby mountain with his single mother and siblings. The back of his neck - “trained over twenty-five years in the Chicago PD” - registers a watcher, someone who’s been creeping around the cottage and disturbing the nesting rooks. But, as the mists of autumn close in, Cal realizes that he’s not as alone as he thought.
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