In the Woods in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Sep 16, 2014 Donna rated it really liked it

Shelves: mystery

What a great book. Police procedural mixed with psychological suspense. I was up until 4:00 a.m. finishing this. There are a few loose ends left dangling -- some people will find this very annoying -- but other plot lines do lead to a conclusion. All the clues are there to solve--I didn't.

I will be interested to read the next book in the series to see how the detectives are portrayed. ...more

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Dec 26, 2014 Molly rated it liked it

Shelves: literary-fiction, kindle, borrowed, 3-stars, good-concept-poor-execution, i-want-to-like-you, meh, mystery, read-in-2014, npr-finds

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Sigh. I didn't hate this, but it mostly disappointed me. I heard about French's The Secret Place through NPR (I think. I've read so many "best of" lists in the last two weeks and they're all blending together). When I looked it up and realized it was the 5th book in some series called the Dublin Murder Squad, I figured I should at least read the first book before I tried jumping in at book five (and also I was number 19 on the waiting list!). Having finished this book, and read a little more abo Sigh. I didn't hate this, but it mostly disappointed me. I heard about French's The Secret Place through NPR (I think. I've read so many "best of" lists in the last two weeks and they're all blending together). When I looked it up and realized it was the 5th book in some series called the Dublin Murder Squad, I figured I should at least read the first book before I tried jumping in at book five (and also I was number 19 on the waiting list!). Having finished this book, and read a little more about the series itself, I'm pretty sure I could have jumped in at any point, since it would appear each book focuses on a different detective. Anyway, all of this is to say that I'm kind of bummed I wasted nearly 600 pages on this story!

We open on a summer day in Dublin...suburb? Knocknaree in 1984. Three children went into the woods and never came out. Hours later, one of the three was found, alone, with torn clothing and shoes full of blood. The other two children were never found, dead or alive. Interesting mystery, right? Well don't get too invested in it.

Cut to twenty-odd years later, when that third child has grown up into Rob Ryan, detective on the Dublin Murder Squad. He and partner Cassie are totally platonic besties who can read each other perfectly and argue like siblings and spend more time together than most married couples, and can you see where this is going? Because that's where it ends up, in spite of my very high hopes that it wouldn't. Anyway, before it goes there (and gets excruciatingly boring, btw), a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods Ryan was found in 20 years earlier, forcing him to go back and confront the ghosts of the past.

Here's my problem: many of the reviews I've read applaud French for her "character driven" style, atypical for a detective story. By definition, a detective story should have a memorable detective, not just some faceless drone. I made a similar point when I read The Cuckoo's Calling, because it bugged me how much time was spent on Strike's messed up relationships and tragic backstory (it's much less of a factor in Silkworm, thankfully). But looking back on it, a lot of that background is what allows him to get into Lula's world and ultimately find her killer -- his status as illegitimate rock star offspring affords Strike more leeway with the famous types. Here, Rob and Cassie's friendship takes center stage too often. Of course, they sleep together just past the 60% mark, and just when the case is finally starting to come together. So instead of focusing on gathering evidence, we're treated to Rob's tortured inner monologue. There's entirely too much focus on the detectives at the expense of their case.

And the case (the present day one, anyway) is interesting. Before they start caring more about whether or not they want to sleep together, Rob and Cassie uncover some nasty details about the murdered girl's family, and there's something not quite right about the archeological dig site near the neighborhood, and also the girl's father has lived in the neighborhood all his life and once Rob and his pre-disappeared mates watched this guy and his two friends rape a girl... We keep weaving back and forth between Katy's murder and Rob's memories of his childhood. Understandably, twelve year old Rob was traumatized by...whatever happened that day, and he has few memories of his childhood before starting boarding school the following year. Snatches keep coming back to him, but it's unclear if he can trust his memories (for instance, he remembers Peter deciding they should stop teasing a fellow classmate, but his mother swears it was Rob who made the other two be nice). And the whole thing with Katy's father is a big fat red herring.

Although we do get a resolution to Katy's murder (tl;dr - her sister is a psychopath, and tricked her idiot boyfriend into doing it by claiming abuse), by the end of the book there is ZERO resolution on Rob's old case. French keeps reaching to imply similarities between the two cases, but other than the fact that both involved children, and took place in the same woods, there's pretty much nothing else to tie the two together. I get that Rob's backstory is an important piece of why he became a detective, and it certainly could have been included, but it felt like a wild goose chase. By the end, neither we nor Rob have learned anything other than what we knew after the prologue. What's the point?

I also found Rob to be kind of an irritating narrator. He's unstable and doing a whole lot of wallowing. By the end of the novel, he's basically fucked up his career and personal life by getting too invested in Katy's case, and he didn't even get any closure on his own issues to make it all worth it. He's...pretty pathetic, really, and hard to root for.

I think the story would have worked better for me if he and Cassie had shared narration duties (she has her own dark past that's hinted at here, and apparently the next book focuses on her), or if the focus had been on the neighborhood. Kind of like Casual Vacancy. It's funny that the book about a city council election was more of a page-turner for me than a murder mystery. I wish we could have rotated perspectives, maybe include Rosalind the psychopath in the mix, perhaps throw in a flashback or two to Katy before her death (since nonlinear narratives are all the rage now). By the last 80% I was doing hardcore, dialogue-only skimming just to get to the end. I was invested enough in the mystery to want to know how it turned out, and again, the mystery (of Katy) itself was intriguing, but I had completely stopped giving half a shit about either of the detectives.

Overall this wasn't terrible, and the style may work for some people. I kept my hold for The Secret Place because the mystery sounded intriguing, and I might pick up one of the other books sometime. I think my biggest issue was that by the end I could not stand the protagonist. There's this whole thing lately (ever since Gone Girl came out) about unlikeable characters, and whether a character NEEDS to be likable and blah blah blah... I have no problem with unlikeable characters. I don't need to "root for" someone to find them fascinating. But, much like Nora in The Woman Upstairs, I just wanted Rob to shut the hell up. ...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Melissa rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: overdue-reads

Very much a debut novel. There's so much navel-gazing on the part of narrator Detective Ryan (who is an absolute shite human to others at times) that it gets in the way of plot turns. (Also, given that my favorite TV show is Criminal Minds I had the villain pegged as likely early on.) Tana French does write messed up humans well. I'd be interested to see how she goes on to develop Cassie's voice in The Likeness - I'd liked her quite a lot in this (a camisole that says "Yuppies taste like chicken ...more

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May 02, 2020 Bridget rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I really wanted to LOVE this book in order to want to read the rest of the series because I have heard so many awesome things about them and because I am unabashedly obsessed with all things Ireland. Don't get me wrong, it is a really well written novel and it had me guessing until the end, but it took me forever to get through because it was so slow (like I'm sure most murder cases realistically are) in some parts. I will, however, give another book in the series a try before I give up entirely ...more

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Jan 08, 2014 Samantha rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

I was left slack-jawed and scrambling for the next one.

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Mar 01, 2014 Emily added it

Shelves: couldntfinish

oh, mo don't hate me,... the language was just too florid... imagine this, imagine that its the perfect this its the perfect that... argh, i hated it within the first paragraph... im so sorry, i really tried ...more

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