In the Woods

In the Woods is Tana French's 2007 debut novel, the Edgar Best First Novel winner and the first volume of the Dublin Murder Squad series. Detective Rob Ryan is assigned to investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl whose body is found at an archaeological dig in Knocknaree, a Dublin suburb. The complication is personal: Ryan grew up in Knocknaree. In 1984, when he was twelve, he and his two best friends went into the same woods. He came out alone. His friends were never found. He remembers nothing of what happened.

French's prose is the major innovation of the novel and the engine of the entire series that followed. The first-person Ryan voice is one of the most carefully constructed unreliable narrators in contemporary crime fiction: literary, observant, charming, and methodically dishonest about what he knows about himself. His partnership with Cassie Maddox carries the structural weight of the procedural; the 1984 backstory carries the structural weight of the mystery. French is doing something most crime fiction is afraid to do: she will not resolve everything. The 1984 case ends the novel the same way it began, and readers who need closure on the cold case have been complaining about it for almost twenty years. They are missing the point.

Recommended as required contemporary literary-crime reading, as the right entry into the Dublin Murder Squad series, and for fans of Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, Denise Mina's Garnethill, and Belinda Bauer's Snap. The Olwen Fouere audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation. Each subsequent Murder Squad novel (The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, The Secret Place, The Trespasser) is narrated by a different detective and stands alone.