In the Woods

In 1984 three children went into the woods outside a Dublin suburb. One was found hours later, gripping a tree, his shoes filled with blood, remembering nothing. The other two were never found.

Twenty years on, Rob Ryan is a murder detective who has told nobody. A twelve-year-old girl is found dead on an archaeological dig in the same wood, and he takes the case.

He takes the case knowing exactly why he should not, and the novel is about that decision.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

French writes literary crime: the procedural is real and well handled, but the subject is the narrator's psychology and the partnership between Rob and his colleague Cassie Maddox, which is the best-drawn relationship in the series.

Her prose is much denser than the genre norm, and the Irish setting — Celtic Tiger development destroying archaeological sites — is doing thematic work rather than providing atmosphere.

The book resolves one of its two mysteries and not the other, deliberately. Readers divide permanently on whether this is the novel's most honest move or a failure of nerve.

French has been consistent that memory and recovery do not work the way crime fiction requires, and that supplying an answer would have falsified the book's own subject.

One mystery is solved and one is not, on purpose, and readers have never stopped arguing about it.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

First of six loosely linked Dublin Murder Squad novels, each narrated by a different detective who appeared as a secondary character in an earlier book.

They can be read in any order, but this one first gives the structure its effect.

French left journalism and acting for fiction and the books show it: each narrator's voice is genuinely distinct, which is unusual in a series and is the main reason readers keep going.

A present-day murder of a child in a wood is investigated by a detective who, as a boy, was found in the same wood with blood in his shoes and no memory of the two friends who vanished. French runs both and resolves only one, which is the source of most reader complaint and is clearly deliberate.

The partnership is the book's real achievement: a friendship between two detectives written with such specificity that it becomes the thing the reader is invested in. The private shorthand, the evenings in Cassie's flat, the takeaway, the jokes nobody else would find funny. Its slow deterioration is the actual tragedy of the novel, regardless of what happens to either of the cases.

The murder is solved. What is destroyed is the friendship, and that is the book.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Rob opens the book by telling the reader directly that he lies, that he is drawn to the dramatic gesture over the sensible one, and that he damages things and people. It is stated plainly in the first few paragraphs, before any plot arrives, and readers routinely forget it entirely by the halfway point. That forgetting is precisely the effect French is working for, and the ending depends on it.

The wood is being cleared to make way for a motorway, and an archaeological excavation is racing the bulldozers to record what is there first. This supplies the plot's deadline and its theme simultaneously: a country building over its own past at speed and calling it progress. The boom-era economics are not atmosphere in this novel; they are motive, and they reach into the investigation itself.

The unresolved thread is the most complained-about element in contemporary crime fiction, and French has been unapologetic: the book is about a man who cannot recover what happened to him, and supplying the answer would falsify its subject. Readers should decide before starting whether that is acceptable.

Each Dublin Murder Squad novel promotes a minor character from the previous book to narrator, so the sequel is Cassie's. It means no book resolves the one before it, and it means the reader's view of any given detective is permanently shaped by someone else's account of them.