Just Finished Reading In the Woods by Tana French

In the Woods, written by Tana French and published in 2007, is a psychological crime novel set in Ireland...with the emphasis on "psychological".  Adam Ryan, going now by the name "Rob", is a police detective working on the Dublin Murder Squad.  When he was a boy Adam went out in the woods outside his rural Irish hometown with two friends...something terrible and unknown attacked them with only Adam returning with a blocked memory, clothes ripped with someone else's blood all over them.  The disappearances were never solved...Adam later joined the police and changed his name to Rob in order not to bring attention to his earlier crisis.  And now there is a new crisis in almost the exact same location: a teenage girl has been found brutally murdered and on what looks like an ancient sacrificial stone in the area.  Ryan, along with fellow detectives Cassie Maddox and Sam O'Neill, are assigned the case...which reignites all of the old suppressed memories that he had from the earlier experience, while Cassie expresses her views on the nature of psychopaths.  The story is told from Ryan's viewpoint, who is brutally honest with his mistakes and character flaws as he stumbles his way through this case and his relationships with others...

In the Woods is one of those stories that seem to be about one thing in the beginning and then morph into something entirely different...I kind of like this paradigm-shifting in fiction.  But if you're intrigued from the early part of the book into reading on to the resolution at the end, you may find yourself bitterly disappointed: it's an entirely different kind of resolution! An important outgrowth of the story is that angle on psychopathic personality types, a topic I plan to explore in a few days on this blog.  Tana French is clearly a talented fiction writer and I'm going to read more of her works, especially this Dublin Murder Squad series for which In the Woods was the first book...