In the Woods

(Spoiler alert).

Adam Robert Ryan is a murder detective in the Dublin, Ireland police force. He's also the sole survivor of a bizarre child abduction and murder that occurred in the woods surrounding the subdivision he called home in the mid-1980s. Searchers found Adam catatonic, gripping a tree so hard his nails were embedded in the bark, his shoes full of his friends' congealed blood.

When Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate the murder of 12-year-old Katy Devlin in the very same woods, does Rob bother telling anyone about this potential conflict of interest? Why No! And so we're off with Rob and Cassie as they both try to solve the Devlin crime, and pierce the fog of repressed memories in Rob's mind about the unsolved disappearances in the woods a generation before.

There's no end to the possibilities. Little Katy's body was found on an altar unearthed by archaeologists, the site soon to be paved over by a new highway, a highway Katy's father was leading a campaign to stop. Katy was soon to go off to a school for the arts to further hone her dancing abilities which had been displayed for all in newspaper reports. So was it some kind of ritual pagan sacrifice? Payback by the developers for her father's opposition to the highway? A pedophile who read about her? Has a child murderer in this bucolic subdivision awakened once again? Are the woods haunted?

In each chapter, the author Tana French slowly reveals information that makes one or more of these theories seem plausible. We see Ryan and Maddox's partnership and friendship in all its resilience, resourcefulness and tenderness. And in each chapter French allows us to watch the slow disintegration of Detective Ryan through his own retrospective gaze; Ryan is the book's first-person narrator. Too much pressure and alcohol; too little sleep, and too many ghosts from the past to exorcise. One of the trickier aspects of reading this Whodunit is trying to decide whether the narrator is to be trusted.

I enjoyed the possibilities laid out far more than the solution of the crime, which didn't quite ring true to me. Yes, Ryan was a mental case by the end of the novel, but his sudden and spirited defense of Katy's sisters Rosalind, who was clearly off-kilter to begin with, and, as we all recognize at the end--a psychopath--seemed out of character, even for him. Of all the mean girls out there, do any really possess the utter lack or remorse and capacity for manipulation that this teenager did? Enough to fool a cynical murder detective? And are sad sacks like Damien really capable of such monstrous crimes? It raises the question of whether doing evil is an act of strength or weakness.

Of course there are psychopaths; people do manipulate and allow themselves to be manipulated. Maybe my problem with the climax is that I'm too naive.

On the whole, I found reading In the Woods a thrilling and pleasurable experience. This one will stay with me for a while.

Comments

[Craig L. Adams]

Really? The author is a very gifted writer, but I found this novel disappointing. We are left hanging about Detective Ryan's past, etc. Cassie seemed too much of a super-cop to me.