In the Woods - Tana French

Tana French’s In the Woods, the first novel of her Dublin Murder Squad series, did quite well for itself when it was published in 2007, even going on to win the 2008 Edgar Award for best first novel. The series, now totaling six books, is still popular with readers of mystery and suspense fiction, but French hasn’t added to it since 2016. Rather, her last two novels, The Witch Elm (2018) and The Searcher (2020), are both standalone titles.

In the Woods focuses on the work and personal relationship of two Dublin murder investigators, Rob (the novel’s narrator) and Cassie, who have developed the kind of partnership that makes them much more effective as a team than either of them would be if they worked alone or with a different partner. They are so good at what they do together that they are allowed to partner-up despite the relative lack of experience that either of them have. But that doesn’t stop the other cops from talking about their “relationship” or their boss being nervous about having two such young cops work together. 

Rob is a cop with a past he has kept hidden from everyone other than Cassie: just over twenty years earlier, he had been one of three victims of an unsolved crime much like the ones he investigates now for the Dublin Murder Squad. As they often did, Rob and his two twelve-year-old friends, a boy and a girl, had gone into the woods to play. Hours later, Rob was found in blood-filled shoes clinging to a tree in shock; his two friends were never seen again, and the mystery of their disappearance is yet to be solved. And now, Detective Rob Ryan and his partner are investigating the murder of a twelve-year-old girl whose body has been found just a stone’s throw from the woods into which Rob’s friends disappeared all those years ago. 

Shockingly, it appears that the two cases may be linked in one of several possible ways, so  Rob knows that if he finally reveals his past he will immediately be yanked from the case, and maybe even fired by the police. Because that is the last thing that Rob wants to see happen, he decides to keep his mouth shut, and because Cassie values their friendship so highly, she plays right along with his game. The problem is that even though Rob has no memory at all of what happened to him and his friends in the woods that day, he is reluctant to interview certain witnesses who may still recognize him from those days, limiting his investigatory effectiveness.

And then, as memory fragments start to come back to Rob little by little, his emotions begin to impact his decisions so negatively that the whole investigation is placed in jeopardy.

In the Woods is a solid police procedural, but it is more about the deep Platonic relationship between Rob and Cassie and what happens to that relationship when Rob begins to crack. The emotional stress that Rob and Cassie experience as their personal loyalties are tested is what makes the novel so deservedly stand out from the crowd the way that it does. Along the way, however, Rob Ryan morphs from an entirely sympathetic character to an annoying whiner of a character who spends much of his narration making excuses for his own behavior. And, frankly, he becomes as personally annoying as the behavior he is trying to excuse. If that is what Tana French was going for, she hit a bases-loaded home run; if not, she swung and missed. 

Bottom Line: In the Woods, in the end, left me feeling frustrated by having had to spend so much time with a character as childishly irritating as Rob Ryan is. But my main complaint is that, after almost 500 pages of reading, only one of the key mysteries in the book gets solved and I’m left wondering about the other one. Thankfully - at least as far as I can tell — the next book in the Dublin Murder Squad series features Cassie, not Rob Ryan. Here’s hoping that Rob has been allowed to walk permanently into the sunset.

Tana French