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7th out of 83 books
—
91 voters
My rating:
add to my books
In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1)
by
Tana French
As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours...more
Paperback, 429 pages
Published
May 27th 2008
by Penguin Books
(first published January 1st 2007)
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From ISawLightningFall.blogspot.com
Three-and-a-half stars
Years ago, one of my father’s clients -- a man from the Emerald Isle named Cosgrove -- dropped by our place and, during the evening, got an insatiable hankering for the hard stuff. So my mother (who was essentially a teetotaler) found a bottle of small-batch scotch someone had given her as a gift and poured him four fingers’ worth. My father began to rib him about his prodigious thirst, but Cosgrove looked at him ov...more
Three-and-a-half stars
Years ago, one of my father’s clients -- a man from the Emerald Isle named Cosgrove -- dropped by our place and, during the evening, got an insatiable hankering for the hard stuff. So my mother (who was essentially a teetotaler) found a bottle of small-batch scotch someone had given her as a gift and poured him four fingers’ worth. My father began to rib him about his prodigious thirst, but Cosgrove looked at him ov...more
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I kept going back and forth between being drawn in by this book and getting bored with it and wanting to put it down. The idea of a detective having to deal with a case that hits home personally is kind of done to death, but I heard the author interviewed on the radio and thought this book might be interesting. She said she planned to write a series with the same characters, but there would be a different lead character in each one. That seemed like a good idea, since series novels can get repe...more
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3.5
this was one of those books that I LOVED reading while I was reading it, but every time I put it down I didn't feel a huge compulsion to rush back to it.
I loved the prose which was occasionally literary (love seeing literary in crime fic)
I loved the narration which had a sense of humour that appealed to me.
Characters were fab and interesting and the setting was brilliantly done ~ Ireland (one of my fave aspects)
I was also intrigued a...more
this was one of those books that I LOVED reading while I was reading it, but every time I put it down I didn't feel a huge compulsion to rush back to it.
I loved the prose which was occasionally literary (love seeing literary in crime fic)
I loved the narration which had a sense of humour that appealed to me.
Characters were fab and interesting and the setting was brilliantly done ~ Ireland (one of my fave aspects)
I was also intrigued a...more
it must be really hard to write convincing mystery novels. you can't have your killer be too obvious or no one will bother reading past the third chapter. but you can't have them be too unexpected, without textual support, or you will be accused of cheating. the super-saturation of police procedurals in all their manifestations: literary and film and teevee, sets the genre up for failure - it just adds up to a steaming bowl of repetition and a dessicated medium. there are about five ways a murde...more
Tatiana
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
fans of dark mysteries
Recommended to Tatiana by:
Megan
In the Woods reminded me a lot of Gillian Flynn's novels (Sharp Objects and Dark Places). All these books are very dark mysteries/psychological thrillers and they all are as much about particular crimes the narrators investigate as they are about the narrators themselves, a disturbed bunch.
Rob Ryan, a detective on the Dublin Murder squad, and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate a murder of a pre-teen girl. The thing is, the girl's body is found in the same woods whe...more
Rob Ryan, a detective on the Dublin Murder squad, and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to investigate a murder of a pre-teen girl. The thing is, the girl's body is found in the same woods whe...more
I spent nearly the entire weekend chewing on this book. It was impossible to put down, even with a throbbing head and shoulders sore from rigidity and blurry vision. I can't believe that I let this one languish on my list for almost a year. A follow-up novel, The Likeness, will be released next month. I might buy a hardcover copy of that one to avoid the library wait, and I never do that. Well, not often, anyway.
Synopsis: Three children disappear in the woods of a small Irish town i...more
Synopsis: Three children disappear in the woods of a small Irish town i...more
Huh? Seriously?
That’s all you’ve got? No freaking
way. Life is too short.
This book was okay
This book did not change my life
The font is too small
It did supply me
with a dysfunctional man
with a haunted past
Sometimes, when you are
close to someone, you miss things
Yes, she said...he said.
Now, I have to read
the damn sequel, (life is short)
Do you want marvels?
Bonnyanne
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
people with time to waste (incarcerated, bedridden etc)
Oh, how I loved this book. Fascinating, tantalizing plot, beautiful exploration of memory and how it teases, lies, and still manages to form the basis of our selves. Loved the characters, loved the setup, loved the hints of mystery, supernatural elements, and the mysterious darkness eminating from the woods. Riviting read.
Then I got to the end.
Tease? No. Piece of po-mo trash? Yes. Don't any authors have the courage to actually finish their books nowadays? (The Crimson Pet...more
Then I got to the end.
Tease? No. Piece of po-mo trash? Yes. Don't any authors have the courage to actually finish their books nowadays? (The Crimson Pet...more
Excellent! I can't say how much I loved In the Woods. Fantastic mystery with enough hints thrown in that I was guessing the entire time and still didn't get it right. Even better, this is a crime drama that doesn't focus on the unsettling details of the crime, or the disturbing particulars of the perpetrator. Rather, Tana French introduces the reader to the detectives working the case and lets us view all of the icky details through their jaded eyes.
Initially I wondered if a female ...more
Initially I wondered if a female ...more
Molly
rated it
Recommended to Molly by:
fleurfisherwordpress - TT
Shelves:
mystery-thriller-suspense
Eh. That's pretty much how I feel about this book. From the opening pages the author's writing style just didn't grab me and that was a problem since the book went on and on and on like that.
The narrator, Rob (aka Adam) Ryan, is a detective in Ireland working on a murder case that just so happens to have taken place in his childhood home town. The story follows his life during this particular case and flashes back to his childhood when he and his 2 best friends went missing in the...more
The narrator, Rob (aka Adam) Ryan, is a detective in Ireland working on a murder case that just so happens to have taken place in his childhood home town. The story follows his life during this particular case and flashes back to his childhood when he and his 2 best friends went missing in the...more
At first, this book reminded me of a hipper, cooler, Irish version of Law and Order: there's a feisty female detective who's as sharp as a pin, and a hip but somewhat elusive male detective who are partnered up and working on the case of their careers - the seemingly senseless murder of a young girl.
And then there's the twist (this isn't a spoiler - it's right there on the book jacket): the male detective, Rob Ryan, was also involved in a missing children's case... as a victim. As a ...more
And then there's the twist (this isn't a spoiler - it's right there on the book jacket): the male detective, Rob Ryan, was also involved in a missing children's case... as a victim. As a ...more
On my way back from my sister's Colorado wedding, I saw this in an airport bookstore while I was looking for a good suspense read for my airplane. I don't read a lot of mysteries, and even if you don't either, it's worth looking at Tana French's tightly wound tale In the Woods.
The hook that pulled me in was the paragraph on the back that described a freaky scene reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. Three 12-year-olds set out to explore the forest in their backyards in the summer i...more
The hook that pulled me in was the paragraph on the back that described a freaky scene reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. Three 12-year-olds set out to explore the forest in their backyards in the summer i...more
Salma
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Anyone- especially those who have a fondness for Du Maurier novels.
Shelves:
mystery-must-reads,
favorites
I've been looking for a good 'literary' mystery/thriller for ages, so I was stoked to find this one. Taking place in Irish country, the story follows Detective Rob Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox as the two of them attempt to solve the murder of a twelve-year-old girl. What makes this story unique? Rob Ryan was a victim of a similar crime as a little boy (though not murdered, obviously) in the same place the girl was found. His friends though, weren't so lucky. So you have these two mysterie...more
Nancy
rated it
Without going into the plot, Ms. French's book was really quite good, considering this is her debut novel. I don't often say that about many people's first work; most of the time I feel like the writer's second novel will be more fully fleshed out and more satisfying to me as a reader. I picked this book up this morning and did not move until I had finished it. I just could not put it down, it was that good. I liked the characters, the twists and turns that the story took, the police procedura...more
Despite not finishing this book, I could not reconcile what I had read with the blurbs on the back cover. It was almost as though the review authors and I were reading entirely different books.
True, the author is prosaic, but that does not automatically translate into "beautiful and brilliantly evocative prose". I found her prose to be long-winded, and used exclusively for atmospheric descriptions, rather than to further the plot.
Secondly, the blurbs mentioned ...more
True, the author is prosaic, but that does not automatically translate into "beautiful and brilliantly evocative prose". I found her prose to be long-winded, and used exclusively for atmospheric descriptions, rather than to further the plot.
Secondly, the blurbs mentioned ...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
I started this over a week ago and was so busy I was only able to peck away at it a few pages at a time, which was killing me. Right away in the first few pages, the writing style struck me as almost lyrical and mysterious. The premise was intriguing - Adam Ryan went missing with two of his friends when they were 12. He was the only one to return, with blood in his shoes and without his memory. Many years and one name change later, he's a detective assigned to a murdered child case in the same t...more
Why...why does this keep happening to me? I keep reading the first part of these books and thinking that they will be well-written. Or compelling. Or...anything that ends in ing which is a good thing and makes me happy. I read it and got pissed that I could have been finding cupcake bakeries and watching those documentaries I've had on my shelf for ages but haven't gotten to yet instead of reading it, and maybe also just a little worried that now I'll be slightly less intelligent and possibly le...more
Christine (AR)
rated it
·
review of another edition
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
mystery fans
Shelves:
mystery
This showed up on amazon's list of the best fiction of 2007 (so far), and through the entire prologue I was wishing very bad things would happen to the marketing department. For one thing, it's first-person POV, which is ordinarily the kiss of death for me, and for another the "rapturous" prose the review raved about was giving me a very definite faux-gothic "last night I dreamed of Manderley" vibe that made me want to bolt -- but two paragraphs into the first chapter the who...more
French's prose is downright beautiful, and she weaves this murder drama into something suspenseful, eerie, and almost otherworldly at times. Perhaps I've read too many novels like The Mysteries by Lisa Tuttle (among others that delve into the Irish legends/myths at the core of a number of missing persons cases in Ireland) but those stories, while never outright mentioned in this novel, colored this reading experience for me (in a good way). Character development was fantastic, and I really enjoy...more
Man, I don't know. I sort of liked this. The author thinks much more highly of her hero than I did, and it is irritating how the background mystery (the more interesting of the two) doesn't get solved. On the other hand, more than a few moments of good writing. On a third hand, she tried to do a whole lot in here---weird moments of the supernatural that made me say "NOW what the hell are you on about?" It's too much: the doomed romance, the old mystery, the new mystery, the myths and l...more
So ok, maybe 5 stars is too much for a crime book. But I enjoyed it, and I still keep thinking about it.
[side rant: I'm still mad at the main character, the narrator. I get where he's coming from. There are reasons why he acts certain way. But still I wish, he'd have done things differently. He's messing up his own life! It is all rather sad and frustrating. Yet, had he done right by himself, I feel that the story would not be as realistic... Bugger!]
It's a debut, and a ...more
[side rant: I'm still mad at the main character, the narrator. I get where he's coming from. There are reasons why he acts certain way. But still I wish, he'd have done things differently. He's messing up his own life! It is all rather sad and frustrating. Yet, had he done right by himself, I feel that the story would not be as realistic... Bugger!]
It's a debut, and a ...more
I absolutely loved "In the Woods". It started a bit slow, but the tension and suspense built steadily until the floodgates of discovery opened. The characters were so well written and the plot was fantastic. The psychological aspect was intriguing. I had to force myself to put it down in the last 1/3. The ending surprised me, but it fit.
I'm torn on this book - I could not put it down, and I'm still thinking about it and emotionally affected by it, but I also started yelling at the book when I got to the end and some stuff wasn't resolved. I felt like I gave French some leeway with coincidences because it's a mystery novel, but I didn't get the payoff of resolution and explanation that I expect in a mystery novel.
This nightmare of a "novel" made me consider bringing back book burning... if it wasn't so unfashionable.
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The ending (needless to say, contains spoilers) | 36 | 234 | Feb 09, 2012 04:04pm | |
| Parent Review Please??? | 11 | 134 | Feb 09, 2012 01:57pm | |
| Thoughts on Adam (for those who have read this book -- otherwise SPOILER) | 7 | 89 | Dec 24, 2011 05:02pm | |
| Favorite Quotes | 3 | 53 | Dec 12, 2011 07:32pm | |
| Tumblr Book Club: October: In The Woods by Tana French | 16 | 17 | Nov 06, 2011 07:15am | |
| Did I miss something? | 35 | 415 | Oct 04, 2011 03:42am | |
| Detective/Mystery Writing | 2 | 31 | Aug 16, 2011 10:11am |
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Tana French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the US and Malawi, and has lived in Dublin since 1990. She trained as a professional actress at Trinity College, Dublin, and has worked in theater, film and voice-over.
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“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”
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53 people liked it
“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself. (307)”
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37 people liked it
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