I wanted so much to like this book! I enjoyed the first few chapters, in which we get to know Rob Ryan, a homicide detective with a secret past. Unbeknownst to everyone except his partner Cassie Maddox, as a child Rob was the only one of three to survive an encounter with a murderer in the woods near his Dublin home. Rob is unable to remember the details of that day's events, so he struggles to hide his past and move on with his life. However, when he and Cassie are tasked with investigating the murder of a 12-year old girl in the same woods, Rob cannot help but notice the similarities and wonder if there is a connection.

Tana French is clearly a talented story teller. She is at her best when focusing on the relationship between Rob and Cassie, and her dialogue really sings. However, the story that she is telling in this book was just not interesting enough to hold my attention for 400+ pages. The ending is odd, and there were a lot of issues left unresolved.

Though this book was disappointing, French is a writer to watch. Hopefully with some careful editing her next book will live up to the potential shown in this one.

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Okay, I'm going to be brutally honest here. When I picked this book up it was because '
1) EVERYONE was reading about it and 2) EVERYONE was raving about it. So did it live up to my expectations?! No way! I struggled to get into it. I am not one that really likes pretty words and explanations ... "just the facts, ma'am" for me. So I found myself skipping over more than a few paragraphs that were just (in my opinion) descriptions to lengthen the book. And the ending, don't even get me going there - there really is no ending, the main character doesn't have an "aha - that's what happened" moment like I had hoped for. This book was just okay in my opinion, and really didn't deserve all the hype that it got.

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I really enjoyed the writer's style & story telling ability... but even that could not make up for the disappointment I felt with so many loose ends left untied. Without saying more & spoiling it; I finshed the last page of the book & found myself utterly annoyed with the author.

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I stayed up late last night to finish this book. I was so p***sed off when I finished, I couldn't even go to sleep. I don't want to give anything away, but basically there are 2 mysteries in this book that may or may not be intertwined. One of the mysteries is fascinating; you cannot wait to find out what happens. The other mystery is not nearly as interesting and I figured it out before the detectives. Here's the kicker: the author does not provide you with a resolution to the more interesting mystery. I felt like she had written a story she didn't know how to finish! There are a couple of subplots that are left unresolved as well, and again, those were the most interesting parts of the story, so you as the reader were emotionally involved enough to want to know what happened.

One more thing that really made me mad, and this may be a *spoiler*: I do not believe for one second that Rob/Adam's parents would have sent him off to boarding school after such a traumatic incident. Their kid is the only one found alive after three kids go missing in the woods. The other two are never found. The survivor is bloody and can't recall a thing. Then the parents send him away to boarding school????!!!! NO WAY. No way, no way, no way. Miss French has the character use this frequently as an excuse for his behavior. I guess she needed that plot point so she just made it up. Too bad she didn't have enough imagination to finish what she started.

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This book was a slow starter for me, picking up somewhere around page 150 and then holding my interest for the remainder of the book. It has it's good points: likable and realistic characters, some psychological thrills, interesting plot. I was glad to hear that French's next book features Cassie, whom I found to be a fascinating character. On the whole I found it to be entertaining but I feel that it needed some editing and paring down of the story. There were times when the details got in the way of the story and I found it frustrating. Also, I figured out the identity of the "bad guy/girl" way too early in the book despite the NPR review on the back of the book that stated "French's plot twists and turns will bamboozle even the most astute reader". Maybe I've read one too many Agatha Christie books but it seemed fairly obvious to me. "In the Woods" is a flawed book but it's still worth reading.

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This book, along with a few other in the series, has been sitting on my shelves for several years. Finally got around to reading it and based on this one I'm motivated to read more in the series. The narrator and protagonist, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad. Years before, he and his two friends were playing in the woods and did not return to their homes as expected. The police find one of the friends, Rob (who went by Adam at the time), gripping a tree trunk, terrified, and wearing blood soaked sneakers. But he cannot recall anything that happened to him and his friends and the case was never solved; his friends or their bodies never recovered.

Years later Adam had changed his name to Rob and is put on a case with his partner, Cassie, to investigate the murder of a 12-year-old girl in the same woods. Only Cassie knows that Rob is actually Adam Ryan, a possible conflict in this case. So could this new case be related to the disappearance of Rob's friends twenty years earlier? Ryan does get some flashbacks of some of what happened in the woods and one of the people he remembers is the father of the young girl murdered. Could he or someone in his family be responsible for the girls's death? There is also an archaeological dig going on where the girls body was found. Could someone on the dig be responsible?

I overall enjoyed this police procedural with Rob and his partners going through the evidence to try to solve the murder. There is also a possible element of the supernatural thrown in which may have been a factor in the original disappearance of Rob's friends. And then there is a somewhat unexpected twist on what really happened. Even though I thought this book was longer than it needed to be and Rob turned out to be somewhat of a jerk, I'll still be looking forward to reading more of this series.

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Didn't care for it.

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