When Halloween came around, I was looking for a book that would spook me without dipping too far into the realm of blood and gore, and let me tell you—this book hit the mark. Tana French builds an investigation of a young girl’s murder around an enigmatic detective duo, one of whom is harboring a soul-eating secret: as a child, two of his friends disappeared from the very same wood and have never been found. As Adam “Rob” Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, delve further into the circumstances surrounding Katy Devlin’s demise, Adam feels remnants of his trauma slipping into his memory, and he starts to wonder if he can restrain his trauma as he always has…or if it will destroy him.
One of the book’s strongest attributes is French’s spellbinding, ethereal prose, much of which captures Detective Ryan’s streams of consciousness. Without going overboard, the author draws us into the hyperactive mind of a person with serious childhood wounds and an ever-fading supply of impulse control. Take this passage, for example:
“I had started trying—for the first time, really—to remember what had happened in that wood…Unleashed, my mind threw out great streams of images like a slide show running on fast forward, and gradually I learned the knack of reaching out to catch one as they flew past, holding it lightly and watching as it unfurled in my hands.”
p. 221
Detective Ryan irked me at times—he can be mind-bogglingly irresponsible and even borderline narcissistic. However, the care with which French fleshes out his disintegrating character ensures that he is the exact opposite of the typical “flat” thriller character, whose development is always secondary to a racing plot. In this book, I witnessed the opposite: the plot of resolving Katy Devlin’s murder serves primarily as the backdrop against which we discover more and more about Ryan’s and Maddox’s lives. I’m an enormous fan of the pair’s quirky partnership and friendship; without spoiling anything critical, I was disappointed with the way their relationship turned out, but I accept that this was a realistic consequence of their inability to cope with the brutal world around them.
In The Woods also gave me similar vibes to parts of Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient in that it delves deeply into the thoughts, feelings, and self-awareness (or lack thereof) that accompanies psychological trauma. Take this snippet from Dectective Ryan’s thought process as he contemplates the appearance of Katy Devlin’s corpse:
“To my mind the defining characteristic of our area is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, bands and brands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.”
p. 53
Despite this deep probing of the human conscience, French still kept me on my toes as her detectives seek to uncover clues about the person behind Katy’s death. The oddball archaeologists racing to dissect a patch of woods that will soon become the site of a major superhighway and Katy’s fascinating family members, from the overly-mature Rosalind Devlin to the sassy baby in the arms of Katy’s aunt, create a cast of characters who are each suspicious in their own right. I also loved the presence of the political battle waged over the building of the motorway, which provides a subplot that underscores the overall tension in the book. With innumerable suspects in Katy’s murder, all of whom have their own grievances and their own motivations, it truly took me until the end to start putting the pieces together.
In conclusion, I highly recommend In The Woods as an even-paced thriller, a spine-tingling escape, and an intensive character study all in one.
