Except the classic situation turns out to be tangential to the main story (although it returns to our attention in the novel’s jaw-dropping final 40 pages). Toby’s moral lapse at the gallery and his subsequent beating recede into the background when he goes to his Uncle Hugo’s house to recuperate, and a skull is found in the wych elm at the foot of the Ivy House garden. I tell you this only because it’s in the damn flap copy, and I trust your own powers of deduction, dear reader, to surmise that an entire skeleton soon follows.

[ Read reviews of Tana French’s last three books: “The Trespasser,” “The Secret Place” and “Broken Harbor.” ]

So far, so Agatha Christie (who is even name-checked in passing). You have the murder victim, another skanger (although a rich one) whose passing we need not mourn; you have the small pool of possible suspects; you have the manor house with the walled-in garden where the body was discovered. But an Agatha Christie novel might run 250 pages or so. “The Witch Elm” is twice that length, and I’m relieved to report that those added pages aren’t just filler.

They are, in fact, the core of the book, and what lands French’s novel in that twilight zone between mystery and suspense (where this book will undoubtedly be shelved at your local bookstore) and literature. It is a strange and rich territory inhabited by such novelists as Michael Robotham, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, James Ellroy and Ruth Rendell. All of these novelists (and a dozen others) have “transcended the genre,” as they say, none of them in quite the same fashion.

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The fine-drawn quality of French’s characterizations is one measure of the novel’s above-average success as literary fiction, which is to say fiction that enriches our lives rather than just serving to pass the time on an airplane or in a doctor’s waiting room. I was especially taken by Toby’s cousins, the former wild-child Susanna and the twitchy I’m-gay-so-deal-with-it Leon. The cops are good, too, with their cheerfully matey dialogue and their probing offhand questions. (Uncle Hugo was a bit too saintly for my taste, but you can’t have everything.)

Characters aside, the book is lifted by French’s nervy, almost obsessive prose. Although they are of different sexes and nationalities, when I read Tana French I’m always reminded of David Goodis (“Dark Passage,” “The Moon in the Gutter” and “Shoot the Piano Player”). She has that same need to go over it, and over it and over it again, like a farmer who can’t plow the field just once but must go at it from every point of the compass, sweating over the wheel of his tractor, not satisfied until every clod has been crumbled away.