Rob Ryan appears to be truly interested in solving the current murder with his partner Cassie Maddox. SPOILER ALERT – THE REST OF THIS POST DISCUSSES THE PLOT AND THEMES IN IN THE WOODS. and will continue to haunt if you read Ms. But more than that, it is a book about friendship and love.ĭon’t look for a happy ending, but the ending will haunt you. The plot is an excellent murder mystery with compelling characters. The setting is a very gritty side of Dublin, appropriately dark and seamy for a haunting book. When is he telling the truth, and when is he lying? The reader wonders, and soon the other characters wonder, too. Throughout the book, we wonder, is Rob a reliable narrator or not? The novel is written in the first person from Rob’s point of view, but he says early on, “What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this – two things: I crave truth. The novel progresses along two fronts-the current investigation, and Rob’s belated attempts to discover what happened to his friends so long ago. Rob remembers nothing of that night, and the disappearances of his friends have never been solved.
Quickly we learn that twenty years earlier Rob survived a bloody incident in those same woods as a child, although two of his neighborhood playmates disappeared and are presumed dead. He and his partner Cassie Maddox are investigating the murder of a 12-year-old girl, murdered in the woods near where Rob grew up. In this first book, the protagonist is detective Rob Ryan.
French tells us in her author’s note that the Dublin Police Department doesn’t have a murder squad, but her creation of this squad gives her an interesting group of characters that she develops through all the books in the series. It is an appropriate haunting and horrific book for Halloween week.
In the Woods was the first in her series about the Dublin murder squad. I have now read her first three books, and her fourth is on my shelf waiting. A writer friend of mine told me about Tana French. I like well-written murder mysteries and police procedurals, and In the Woods, by Irish author Tana French qualifies.
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