Detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox were the ones who took the call that day, about the archaeologists in the woods who found the body. Even though they were two of the younger detectives on Dublin’s Murder Squad, they were the ones who were available to take the call. They weren’t expecting much. Archaeologists found old bodies sometimes in a dig, a set of bones, and they needed to call the police in. It was just protocol. But when the detectives drove out to Knocknaree, what they found wasn’t some old bones. It was a dead twelve-year-old girl, Katie Devlin, who had just been killed and left in the woods.
Rob knew immediately that he should speak up, that he should refuse the case. But the woods called to him. Twenty years previous, he had been a kid named Adam in Knocknaree. He’d been playing in the woods with his friends Jamie and Peter. They’d stayed out way past the time their moms had told them to be home, past tea, past dark. Their parents went to look for them. Everyone went to look for them. They found Adam clinging to a tree, long rips in the back of his t-shirt, his shoes filled with blood. Jamie and Peter were never found.
It turns out that Adam was relatively unharmed, the blood in his shoes not his. But the trauma he experienced erased his memory, and it didn’t take long for the town to turn against him. He was sent off to an English boarding school, and his parents moved away from Knocknaree. Adam changed his name to Rob, and made his way onto the Murder Squad. But he still had all of Adam’s questions in his head. What happened that day in the woods? Why was he the only one spared? Or, if it was that his friends had run away, why was he the one left behind? Twenty years of questions, and now another child lost to the woods. He knew he should refuse the case, but how could he?
As he and Cassie start to work the case, investigating the family, local politics, possible connections to the case from 20 years ago, Rob finds himself more and more stuck between the present and past, trying desperately to put together the puzzle that will bring Katie’s murderer to justice and to answer his (and the whole town’s) 20-year-old questions.
Tana French’s In the Woods is a police procedural masterwork. At over 600 pages (over 20 hours on audio!), this novel covers not only the investigation into a grisly child murder but also the rich inner life of detective Rob Ryan. Each step of the case comes to vivid life with Ryan and a cast of strong, believable characters who look under every rock (literally) in order to figure out who would want this young innocent girl killed. But just as fascinating as following the police is the way we see inside the mind of a grown-up traumatized kid. Rob’s journey from murder detective back to kid whose friends disappeared from the woods, his rescued memories offering clues in bits and pieces, breadcrumbs for him to follow as he tries to find his way home after all those years.
I listened to the audio book for this, and narrator Steven Crossley will forever be the voice of Detective Ryan in my mind. I thought his narration was perfection, and though it’s a very long book, Crossley made French’s words sing with meaning and depth, making those 20+ hours fly by.