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 in the 1950s. They disappear. The resulting search finds one of the three children wearing shoes and socks that are soaked from the inside with blood. He's gripping onto the bark of a tree hard enough that his nails bleed. He remembers nothing.

Fast forward and meet Detective Rob Ryan. He's investigating a modern-day murder in the same woods. As the lone survivor of the strange and still-unsolved case from the 1950s, he hides his identity because he knows he'll get pulled from the current case and lose his chance to figure out what happened to him in the woods so long ago.

Fans of procedurals will enjoy French's inscrutable tale. If you are usually too snobby to read "genre fiction" (you know who you are) make this one of the few "literary" genre pieces you select. As much as this is a tale of psychological suspense, it is a story about relationships, forgiveness, and trying to figure out how and if old wounds can be healed.