343. In the Woods
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Tana French
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller
464 pages, published May 27, 2008
Reading Format: Book
Summary
In the Woods opens with the disappearance of Peter and Jamie, two twelve year old children, from the woods nearby their small town of Knocknaree in Ireland where they often played with their best friend Adam. Adam is discovered the next day in the same woods with his tennis shoes soaked in blood and no memory of what happened. Fast forward 20 years later and Adam (who now goes by Rob) is a police detective in a nearby town. When another 12 year old is found murdered near in the same woods where Peter and Jamie disappeared, Adam and his partner/best friend Cassie are assigned to the case. The investigation stirs up lots of old memories for Adam and his life begins to unravel.
Quotes
“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.”
“I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.”
“The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.”
“Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.”
“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.”
“She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. “You should go for younger women,” she advised me. “They can’t always tell.”
“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.”
“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.”
“People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it’s all backwards. It’s not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.”
My Take
After reading and loving The Witch Elm earlier this year, I definitely wanted to read more by the incredibly talented Tana French. In the Woods is the first of her six book Dublin Murder Squad series and did not disappoint. French compensates for a slowly building (at times meandering) plot, by creating detailed and nuanced characters in a richly drawn atmosphere. This is a mystery and you want to know what happened, but you are also happy to spend time in the compelling world created by French. I look forward to reading more from this impressive writer.
