In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1)

by Tana French

I disliked the New Neanderthal locker-room overtones, competing cars and competing aftershaves and subtly bigoted jokes justified as “ironic,” which always made me want to go into a long pedantic lecture on the definition of irony.

his idea of humor was to reenact large segments of Wallace & Gromit

I have always had an excellent brake system, a gift for choosing the anticlimactic over the irrevocable every time.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned.

I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.

I had a sense of things stirring, rearranging themselves in some imperceptible but crucial way, tiny unseen cogs beginning to shift.

squads with a high horror quota—Murder, Sex Crime, Domestic Violence—either you learn to switch off or you transfer to Art and Antiques. If you let yourself think too much about the victims (what went through their minds in their last seconds, all the things they’ll never do, their devastated families), you end up with an unsolved case and a nervous breakdown.

I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood.

But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.

I had been aware that I was sleeping less than usual and drinking more, that I was snappy and distracted and possibly sort of seeing things, but no specific incident had seemed particularly ominous or alarming in itself.

Even at moments like this, there is a limit to how weird I am prepared to appear.

I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right.

christening—he had the kind of extended family that holds full-scale gatherings almost on a weekly basis, someone was always getting christened or married or buried—and

If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn’t forgive her for being hurt.

Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected.

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.