One of the murder unit detectives questions a suspect, trying to persuade him to implicate himself, in great detail. She tells him that the ones who suffer the most are the ones who never tell anyone. They hold it in and it slowly eats away at them. They become depressed, guilt-ridden, many commit suicide. While she’s telling him this, she thinks to herself that, unfortunately, it’s not true. Of the people who commit bad acts and are never discovered, many go on with their lives. They manage to bury it inside themselves, to ignore it, to persuade themselves it never happened, to convince themselves they’re good people and what they did was right and necessary, or whatever; but they manage just fine.
This is a trope for the novel as a wholes and for the main character in particular. Rob Ryan, her partner and friend, is involved in the case they’re investigating up to his neck, but is also living with his own buried memories about what happened when he was 12 years old when two of his friends disappeared in the woods one night, forever, and only he was found, with the blood of his friend in his sneakers. The case they’re working on brings him back to the scene, so the nightmarish case they’re working on throws him headlong into his own repressed memories, which begin to emerge and psychologically torture him. What happens with the memories is one of the two mysteries of the novel.
I’m tempted to agree with many people that the lack of resolution to this mystery is frustrating. And so it is. And yet, it also seems very realistic, which in my mind largely redeems French’s choice here. Maybe Ryan can’t live with being conscious of what really happened. Repressing it may just be his best option in order to move on with his life. Which, for sure, has been seriously compromised by those events of his childhood, and their aftermath. The reader wants and hopes and wishes so hard for him to realize something, to overcome his emotional handicaps and right his important relationships. In real life, his struggle, and therefore the reader’s, is likely to be endless. Life is frustrating, and such emotional scars can easily affect us for our entire lives.
The book is deeply crafted, well-written, with complex characters and relationships, each with complicated pasts, and the story challenges the reader. That’s a good thing. I did find it overly verbose at times, but this is a minor criticism. One of the best crime mysteries I’ve read. (This is my first read of a Tana French book, so I can’t compare.)
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The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
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Well written but ultimately disappointing
Three children disappear “in the woods” of a small Irish town and only one is found with blood-filled shoes and no memory of what happened to his friends. This boy grows up to be a murder detective named Rob Ryan and when the body of a young girl is found at an archaeological dig on the outskirts of the woods where he was found, he returns to his childhood home with his partner Cassie in search of answers.What a great beginning.In the Woods is a well-written thriller with an interesting premise and Tana French manages to breath life into the familiar tortured detective character. There is a very film-noir-with-a-twist feeling to the whole novel. The opening passage is such an atmospheric description of a childhood summer—I was hooked as soon as I opened the book. Well-written murder thrillers are my favorite. You get the satisfaction of a solved mystery without the feeling that you just ate an entire pint of cheap ice cream. However, while I did gobble this book up in two days, I was left hungry.***SPOILER ALERT***As the story progresses the pressure of the case and his repressed memories get to Ryan and he starts to self-destruct. He and Cassie sleep together and he proceeds to become an utterly despicable, irritating character, ignoring her explanations and shutting himself down and making horrible decisions. I enjoy a good dislikable narrator and Ryan was particularly interesting to me because his character change was such a slow downward spiral. I started out really liking him and by the end I wanted to drench him in gasoline, light a match, and watch him burn. It is a fascinating study of how trauma and repressed memories can effect a person’s behavior.Ryan is at his most despicable when, upon solving the case of the dead girl at the archaeological site, he accuses the reader of being hoodwinked by the two murderers as well. This is simply infuriating since the killers are so obviously suspicious from their very first introductions. I loved hating Rob Ryan and was enjoying the ride but then, thunk. The story ends and we still don’t know know what happened to the children in the woods…How do you write a mystery story and not solve the mystery?I didn’t mind that Ryan was a horrendous human being or that the child murderers were obvious from the start because these things seemed like they were part of a bigger picture, but when I was never shown that bigger picture, the framing mystery seemed like a cheat to keep me reading without reward. The book is called In the Woods for god’s sake–we should know what happened “in the woods”. By the end of the book Rob Ryan had become such an infuriating, confused character that I was left with the vague impression that he had killed his childhood friends, but if that was what French was going for, it was insanely subtle. Maybe French is saving the big reveal for later in the series but that’s quite a gamble as I would only read another book about Detective Rob Ryan if it was a heavily detailed description of his slow and painful disembowelment.
Top reviews from other countries
Skeeter
Tana French is a find. A deft, intelligent writer of a complex, riveting page turner.
Reviewed in Canada on November 24, 2023
Nachiketa Joshi
Excellent mystery, though you got a feel of the perpetrator nice and early
Reviewed in India on April 2, 2024Amazon Customer
A book that will stay on your mind for a long time...
Reviewed in France on January 15, 2022Giuseppe Guida
i dont like the writing style
Reviewed in the Netherlands on May 8, 2021