Now that summer has officially arrived, it’s time to start thinking about your vacation reading list. Summer for me has always been a season of taking chances: wearing that sundress that’s a little too age-inappropriate, sporting that new short haircut or traveling to an unknown destination. This year though, I’ve decided to transcend my genres and try to read literature I would not normally pick up, to “think outside the book.” So I’m recommending the last great book I read: an Irish detective mystery called In the Woods, by Tana French.
I literally judged this book by its cover. I was at my monthly book group meeting and noticed the book in my friend’s “to be read” pile, with its stark white jacket, the title and author’s name in black block lettering designed to appear as silhouetted tree branches creeping across the cover. I read the plot description and filed it under “intriguing” in the reading wish-list I keep in my brain. A few weeks later I was in my local library. In this particular branch, there are paperback carousels to peruse while waiting in the check-out line, as if the library were a grocery store and the paperbacks the afterthought packs of gum or batteries forgotten in the aisles. There it was, In the Woods, the eerie cover, the title, calling out read me! I couldn’t deny it.
The story is thus: in summer 1984 three friends escape the boredom of their Dublin suburb and head off to play in the adjacent woods. Only one came home after the police found him bloodied and clutching a tree trunk. The boy’s amnesia prevents the police from solving the mystery. It is twenty years later and the boy, Rob Ryan (who now goes his middle name for anonymity), and his partner, Cassie Maddox, a former undercover officer, are the lead detectives on a new case. Katy Devlin, a twelve-year-old ballerina is found murdered on the site of an archeological dig in the same woods. Only Cassie knows Rob’s secret and together they delve into the cavern of Katy’s family history and study and pursue the killer as they also navigate the Irish justice system and their own personal connection. There they find the psychology of betrayal and the human instinct, only to discover subsequent mysteries hidden underneath. I give In the Woods five bookmarks. I wish I could have written it myself.
What I find striking about this book is how it constantly caught me off guard. I’ve always thought thrillers are words wrapped around a plot skeleton with arms branching out to lead us astray. And although this book is marketed as psychological suspense, it is literary in all respects. French’s voice is raw and brutally honest, detailed and rich. I didn’t want it to end. But it did and it still haunts me. Reviewers have criticized this book for having an unsatisfying resolution – one of the main mysteries remains unsolved – but it makes perfect sense. There would be no irony in life without the unanswered questions we carry to our graves.
Tana French’s story, though, continues. She has followed up this début novel with two more that interconnect to the first. The Likeness follows Cassie as she teams up with her former undercover boss, Frank Mackey, as they investigate the murder of a student who is Cassie’s double and was living under Cassie undercover identity. The third book, Faithful Place, follows Frank as he probes into the disappearance of a long ago girlfriend. You can solve the mystery about Tana French on her website: www.tanafrench.com or look her up on Amazon to find more reviews and interviews.
Read In the Woods and make this a whodunit summer!
