Tana French is the Edgar Award-winning author of the Dublin Murder Squad series. The newest, called The Trespasser, is the sixth in the best-selling, habit-forming series. "It’s taken for granted that anybody who’s read one [Tana French novel] will very shortly have read them all,” wrote Laura Miller in the New Yorker. French wrote her debut novel, In The Woods, in the long stretches between parts as a stage actress in Dublin. That theatrical training - understanding people from the inside out - may well be the edge that sets her books apart from other mysteries and police procedurals. The search for the killer becomes entangled with a search for the self, or as Miller put it, "in most crime fiction, the central mystery is who is the murderer? In French’s novels, it’s who is the detective?” Music by Podington Bear Ad music by Uncanny Valleys Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tana French was an actor in her thirties when she sat down to write about a mystery that took the lives of two children, which became the global blockbuster “In the Woods.” With her subsequent books about the Dublin Murder Squad, French became known as “the queen of Irish crime fiction”—despite having been born in the United States. French’s latest book, “The Witch Elm,” departs from her line of police procedurals: the narrator is a civilian, a happy-go-lucky young man named Toby whose life is turned upside down when he is attacked during a burglary. Although the book involves a murder, “The core story arc is not the murder and the solution,” French tells Alexandra Schwartz. “The core story arc is Toby going from this golden boy [with] his happy life to somebody who’s had that shattered. . . . Where will this crisis take him?” Though known as a literary mystery writer, French acknowledges that some of her fans have found the plot frustrating. “If you’re coming to this book expecting a straight-up crime novel . . . you are going to be a hundred pages in [asking], ‘Where’s my murder?’ ”