This book left me feeling, I don't know, maybe bereft is the word? Having read Faithful Place and Even Stevens's review of In the Woods, I knew I wasn't going to have a run-of-the-mill mystery on my hands, and In the Woods did not disappoint. The story has lingered in my head even weeks after I finished reading it.

As I've written before, one of the reasons I find mysteries so lovely and fun to read is because much of the time, the character I'm most attached to is fundamentally separate from the central drama of the story. Even when the detective or whatever is in danger, you sort of know that for the story to continue he or she needs to be ok, right? At the end of the story there's usually a putting-everything-in-its-placeness that makes me feel like a little kid picking up my toys at the end of an afternoon of play. French takes our assumptions of safety and just totally crushes them. To great effect! To survive is not necessarily to be alright and to look for answers is not necessarily to find them.

Let me tell you what the book is about, before I continue to make vague, mysterious pronouncements: a young girl's body is found at an archeological site outside the village of Knocknaree, which itself is a detached suburb of Dublin built in the seventies in some sort of developers-gone-wild frenzy. Two detectives from Dublin's elite murder squad are assigned to the case: Cassie Maddox (a fantastically realized female character, can I just mention that? no wonder she's the star of French's second novel) and Rob Ryan. As it turns out, Ryan himself grew up in Knocknaree, and was probably the only survivor of three children who went missing there in the eighties. He was known as Adam Ryan then, and after his two friends disappeared (never to be seen again), he was found clinging to a tree in the woods outside Knocknaree, his shoes soaked in blood and his memory wiped utterly clean of whatever horror he may have witnessed. Rob keeps his past a secret, even when he becomes involved in the investigation of the newer murder. He's drawn to the new case (inevitably, one feels) and for the first time in his life, he is forced to come to terms with how his childhood experience shaped him.

One thing I like to do when I really enjoy a book is to go on Amazon and read people's reviews of it, so I can feel vindication and contempt for other readers, in turn, depending on whether they agree with me or not. Obviously! So without going into details that will spoil this book for you, I will say that there's controversy all up in the ratings, but that's because French doesn't treat her characters like toys. Like any really good writer, she's willing to make her characters face the one un-faceable thing in their lives (and isn't that why we read good books?); she doesn't seem content with low stakes or facile endings.

My one little quibble: at times, this book was maybe a little over-written, especially when compared to Faithful Place. French is such a sensuous writer that it's probably inevitable that her prose occasionally gets a little overwrought. It's interesting to see how French is evolving, and I for one am looking forward to reading more of her stuff.

This is my very first Cannonball III Review, and right off the bat, let me make a confession: I didn’t read this. I listened to it instead. I hope you all don’t mind, but my commute is ridiculous and a girl can only listen to so many NPR stories about genocide/plagues/the endtimes before she begins to get depressed. For me, it’s more like National Panicking-quietly-in-my-car Radio, but I digress.

So: literary mystery set in Dublin. Undercover detective Frank Mackey is forced to return to the home he ran away from decades before when a mysterious suitcase is discovered in a neighboring abandoned house. Mackey’s childhood home—where his parents and older brother still live—is located in a cul-de-sac called Faithful Place: a claustrophobic place full of the kinds of characters that can only be played for laughs or tragedy. It’s the kind of little neighborhood where everyone is drunk, unhappy, or desperately oblivious. Anyway, perhaps the most defining choice of Frank’s life was to leave Faithful Place, but the appearance of the suitcase (or, rather, what he discovers subsequently) completely changes how he perceives the events that lead up to him making that choice. As the bodies pile up, Frank is drawn further and further into “the bubbling cauldron of crazy that is the Mackeys at their finest”, and is forced to confront the history he’s been avoiding for so long. And what a history it is. French has an enormous gift for making every character feel alive, their wrinkles well-earned, their traumas and disappointments important in our judgments of who they are and what they have done. The result is that what could easily be a melodramatic story about the way violence taints its victims feels wholly original. There’s a once-beautiful, abusive, alcoholic father figure—that old standby—and even that feels fresh.

One of the most surprising things about the way this novel was put together is that we’re given the answer to the mystery about halfway through, but French actually shows us Frank and the other characters dealing with the fallout of what has happened. It’s a rare thing and a great part of the book’s success that the detective character is so invested in the results of what he’s investigating. The more he learns about who his family was and is, the more difficult his position becomes. There’s an awful sense of the real consequence of violence: that, unlike you or Hercule Poirot, the characters in the story are never going to be able to walk away from what has happened.

For next week, I’m trying to finish Great Expectations*, and I think I’ll end this with a little Pip: “What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural sunlight from the misty yellow rooms?”

*(No, not because Oprah said to.)