In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1)

by Tana French

It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception.

Essentially warning the reader to doubt his words. Also the irony of seeking out the truth with lies is not lost.

One of the Stephen King small towns where I was posted after Templemore had a murder:

You can have a Stephen King small town in Ireland?

The grapevine claimed, inevitably, that she was sleeping with someone important, or alternatively that she was someone’s illegitimate daughter, or—with a touch more originality—that she had caught someone important buying drugs and this job was a payoff for keeping her mouth shut.

but 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.

This detective is woke.

I immediately regretted it—I have never been talented at banter, and you never know, she could have been some earnest droning feminist extremist who would lecture me in the rain about Amelia Earhart.

I don't know how to feel about this.

and he had beaten up the homeless guy, who was known as

Beardy Eddie, for stealing his blanket. After he signed his statement, Wayne wanted to know if he could have his blanket back.

I like how morally ambiguous it is if they are doing the right thing.

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.

Tara a French has read her Foucault.

To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

This is an interesting speech, but I don't buy that it comes from the speaker.

It would feel naïve and basically cheesy to unweave my personality, hold up a strand and squeal: Golly, look, this one’s from Knocknaree! But here it was again, all of a sudden, resurfacing smugly and immovably in the middle of my life, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

This whole paragraph is such great writing.

“Was this the work of a satanic cult?” asked a large woman in unflattering ski pants, whom we’d met before.

Is this an Irish thing?

His wife had left him the year before; since then the grapevine had picked up a series of awkward attempts at relationships, including one spectacularly unsuccessful blind date where the woman turned out to be an ex-hooker he had arrested regularly in his Vice days.

I love the little sly details of this novel.

she ran down

wearing a Paddington Bear duffle coat and carrying a thermos of coffee.

This sounds like it is a Paddington Bear themed coat. Bad sentence.

A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood.

I love this.

“Do you really feel that way about our job?” I asked, when she came out of the bathroom (small bare feet, smooth calves muscled like a boy’s).

I hope they don't get together, because the sexual tension is more interesting.

Even after all this time, I find it difficult to describe them to you.

Wait--this account is coming from much later? And who is the you?

but when I got

back she was still sitting on the edge of the bench, biting her lip and picking the petals off a daisy.

Never good symbolism.

but I have a fairly good nose for deception, and I was pretty sure there was something Karen wasn’t telling me.

I wonder now, of course, whether I should have; but I can’t see that, in the long run, it would have made any difference to anything at all.

Again that retrospective voice.

I wondered where

the girls like this had been when I was eighteen. She was naïve, but she knew it; she told jokes on herself with such zest and mischief that—in spite of the context, and my creeping worry that this level of innocence would get her into trouble one day, and Jessica sitting there watching invisible booglies like a cat—my laughter was real.

"creeping" because, despite himself, the detective is getting a little too attached to this teenager.

They were the only ones she’d had in ages. She dislikes scones on the grounds that they “don’t taste like food.”

I love Cassie.

going out with a divorced fella for a few years, near gave Marie a heart attack, but it didn’t last.”

Finish that scone,” she ordered Cassie, who had surreptitiously put it down and was trying to look as if she’d forgotten it was there.

Wonderful comedic timing.

and I thought of ancient civilizations where the bereaved

offered their hair on loved ones’ funeral pyres.

The archaeological analogies are becoming more present.

“Fair enough, alleged rape. I don’t care either way unless it has some bearing on a murder. That’s all I’m here to find out.”

Cops lie.

I tried to look trustworthy and not blink.

I like how he is not a macho cop but an earnest man trying to do the right thing.

I wasn’t sure what I thought of the direction in which this appeared to be going, but I felt a sudden, unwelcome dart of something like envy.

I love the way that French deals with complex feelings.

People were coming up to me to tell me that I was the reason why genuine rapists got away with it. One girl said I deserved to be raped so I’d realize what a horrible thing I’d done.”

This sounds false to me.

threat. Now I think I was wrong. 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.

Ominous. But what does this have to do with the case?

I felt as if I had been moving among empty dresses hung in some dim attic and had suddenly bumped smack into a human body, warm and solid and alive.

This is a strange and oddly feminine analogy.

I abhor physical violence, I always have; the very thought makes me flinch.

This is not a very good cop.

My dreams were uneasy ones, with a clogged, tainted quality to them.

Beautiful sentence.

You haven’t a titter of sense, so you haven’t, Peter Savage, just you wait till Mammy hears about your carry-on…”),

One of the few moments we get a true Irish accent.

“It’s not easy being a detective, period,” I said. I did not want to talk about Cassie. “We manage.”

Rob is slowly becoming an ALL LIVES MATTER person.

I caught my breath. It went through me like an electric current, how badly I wanted to lean forward and cup my hand around the back of her head and kiss her.

Rob really is revealing how horrible of a person he is.

She was eighteen years old and she might still end up being my main witness;

Convenient age.

I was trying to be gracious, but a self-pitying part of me felt this was typical:

Rob is such a small man. That smallness was comical at the start, but isn't anymore.

He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder. His hand shook a little, and I saw a damp, unhealthy sheen on his face.

He knows the person on the other end of the line.

I didn’t even want to think about the intolerable possibility that it had something to do with Cassie:

God, Rob is so up his own ass.

“Don’t know the word,” Sam said wearily, reaching for his glass. “But I get the idea. You’re saying I should leave it.”

This is weird. Isn't Sam supposed to be the educated one? Rob always struck me as the dummy.

“Minor coincidence?” Cassie shoved her hands into her pockets, hard. “Rob. If this were anyone but Rosalind Devlin, what would you be doing right now?”

Yeah he is an asshole.

I did not want Rosalind to associate me in any way with this whole debacle.

What an awesome asshole.

And Katy—I mean, Katy would have gone and done the exact same thing to somebody else. If only Katy wasn’t there, they’d all be fine!

This is a weak explanation.

To this day I’m not sure how I managed to get myself into that van.

Probably because you are the narrator?

I thought of how beautiful they would look, to some early watcher: Cassie windblown and easy, Rosalind fluttering white and slender as something from a poem;

STOP GETTING HORNY FOR THE TEENAGER, ROB.