In The Woods

In The Woods by Tana French is a psychological thriller published in 2007. It is the first in the Dublin Murder Squad series. French's writing is different from what I usually read and it took me a while to become accustomed to her style, but I loved this novel.

Three children,  Germaine (Jaime) Rowan, Adam Robert Ryan, and Peter Savage go missing on the afternoon of August 14, 1984 in the woods of Knocknaree (outside of Dublin). When the police are called, they are only able to find one of the children--with his shirt torn, shoes bloody, and no recollection of what happened to him or to his friends in the woods. Twenty year"s later, Detective Rob Ryan (the boy who was rescued) and his partner Cassie Maddox investigate the murder of a twelve year old girl in the same woods. This investigation is Ryan's best chance of solving the mystery of his own past.

The wood of Knocknaree is a character in its own right, living, breathing, and driving much of the novel. "The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion. Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tine noises--rustles, flurries, nameless truncated shrieks; its emptiness teems with secret life, scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye....These three children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know the microlandscapes of their own grazed knees; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing an t they could find their way out without putting a food wrong. This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams....These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirements for them" (French 2).

French writes a complex and multi-layered tale. At the end, what happened in the woods is clearer, but the truth remains elusive. Our narrator, Detective Ryan, cautions readers of this. "What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. 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" (French 3).