"The Witch Elm" by Tana French

The Witch Elm is a very enjoyable book. It's suspenseful with a tightly-wound plot. The main characters, including the narrator, are unusual, believable, mostly sympathetic, but not at all predictable. Descriptions and conversations are wonderfully vivid, including an unusual number of observations not only about what the characters ate, but also about how things in their environment smell --

• "a huge fragrant bag of Thai takeaway." (p. 91)
• "the casserole was good, rich with herbs and full of big hearty chunks of beef and potato and carrot" (p. 149)
• "experimental dinners full of ingredients I didn’t know how to pronounce, let alone what to do with (galangal? teff?)" (p. 156) 
• "It smelled like him, a faint comforting scent of wet wool and dusty old books and smoky tea." (p. 456). 

Right at the start, the narrator introduces himself -- a very lucky man, he says -- and the Ivy House, in Dublin, where most of the book's action is to take place: he ponders "what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal." (p. 5). At the end of the book, it's up to the reader to evaluate the many times he says how lucky he is! 

The narrator's introduction to Ivy House is an example of much that I like in the writing:

"And of course there was the Ivy House. I don’t think anyone could convince me, even now, that I was anything other than lucky to have the Ivy House. I know it wasn’t that simple, I know all the reasons in intimate, serrated detail; I can lay them out in a neat line, stark and runic as black twigs on snow, and stare at them till I almost convince myself; but all it takes is one whiff of the right smell— jasmine, lapsang souchong, a specific old-fashioned soap that I’ve never been able to identify— or one sideways shaft of afternoon light at a particular angle, and I’m lost, in thrall all over again." (p. 4). 

The role of the house is fascinating: at the end, it became "this dim house where ivy crisscrossed the windows and all my clothes smelled faintly of mildew." (p. 457).

Reviewing this beautifully constructed book is a terrible challenge because the least discussion of the events in the book would be a real spoiler.  In Stephen King's review of the book in the New York Times, he put it this way: 

"As a reviewer, it’s my job to at least make a scratch at describing the plot of the novel, but as a fellow novelist, I balk at giving more than a few bare details. (In my opinion, the flap copy gives away far too much — when you know everything that’s going to happen in the first 140 pages or so, somebody went overboard.) A good novel, especially one that fits, however uncomfortably, into the mystery genre, is like an expensive Swiss watch. My job is to admire it, not overwind it."

I haven't read the earlier detective novels by Tana French, but they now seem very tempting.