Do You Know What Lies In the Woods (by Tana French)?

In the Woods by Tana French is Book 1 of the Dublin Murder Squad series and takes place in the mid-late 90s. This story has cellphones, but it has the 90s essence I remember; we were on the cusp of impressive technological advancements. The internet was only just picking up speed compared to what it is today. Why was I thinking about this while reading the book? Well, at the time, I had just discovered Stuart Mackey on TikTok through a duet with another content creator, Queen Astraea. And like with DannyPhantom.Exe, I have a few similarities and interests in common with Stuart. I've become one of his active supporters. 

Back in April, he did a Live on TikTok and was transparent with his viewers. The next day, he had a story on Instagram to which I commented on and he responded. It is this action that got me feeling so grateful for the technology in this era, to be born in this era, despite my daily gripes about various types of tech. I am grateful to be able to communicate with people from around the world in mere seconds, whether it's Stuart, Danny, people in their communities, random people in comments or even people in a Discord server. Not only am I grateful for the ability to communicate but just to know of them, to see bits and pieces of who they are and what they do each day from across the pond or across the border. 

Detective Rob Ryan of In the Woods comments on how he "had been robbed blind" by the disappearance of his best friends as a kid. This just made me think that people today can be alone in their offline world but have a vast online world of acquaintances and friends. I already had this Tana French book because I wanted to read something by an Irish author. I was motivated to read it back in April because I'd seen that Stuart had another one of her other books and I thought it time to check out her work.

So, they may be on the other side of the world, but I am grateful for the ability to find kindred spirits through technology where we can talk about books, movies and how our day went.

Photo by Dave Reed on Unsplash

Summary

TRIGGER WARNINGS: This book contains smoking, graphic and sexual violence, blood, descriptions of anatomy and mentions of abuse.

Three friends go into the woods of their neighborhood, Knocknaree, and when the parents realize the kids are missing, they search the area, finding only one of them in a state of shock with blood on his clothes and in his shoes. The other two kids are never found.

The kid who was found suffers from amnesia. Years later, he joins the police force and, as luck would have it, Detective Rob Ryan gets a homicide case in the same area where his friends disappeared. He and his partner, Detective Cassie Maddox investigate the murder of a 12-year-old ballet dancer, unearthing disturbing familial issues while Rob faces the ghosts of that fateful day.

TL;DR: I didn't like the book, but Tana French is a superb writer.

  -- Spoilers --

Photo by cottonbro

Characters

Detective Rob (Adam) Ryan: His first name is Adam but because of the woods incident as a child, he uses his middle name; went to boarding school where he picked up a BBC accent, so people think he's English instead of Irish; is thirty years old, smokes and likes expensive clothes; doesn't remember much of what happened as a child or what happened to his friends; is superficial when it comes to relationships with women; is Cassie's partner in the Murder Squad.

Detective Cassie Maddox: Has short, dark curly hair and a slim figure like a gymnast; was stabbed while undercover, so she chose her new assignment to be on the Murder Squad; hates everything about being undercover; drives a Vespa; is twenty-eight years old, smokes and is the fourth woman to join the Murder Squad; is Rob's partner in the Murder Squad.

Detective Sam O'Neill: Detective in the Murder Squad for seven years; is thirty-four years old, stocky, cheerful, and reliable; from Galway; everyone wants him as their back-up; some think that he's on the team because he has an uncle who is a mid-level politician; cares for Cassie as a human being towards the end of the book. 

What I Liked

Writing Style

The prologue is only three pages, but it's mesmerizing and packed with detail. The atmosphere is descriptive of summer and engages all the senses for the reader: 

This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits [...] and shaken bottles of red lemonade [...] It tingles on your skin with BMX wind [...]; it chimes and fountains with bird calls, bees, leaves and football bounces [...]. (p. 1)  

The prologue hooks the reader further by adding the tension that the three kids go into the woods, but something lurks.

Emerson and Nature

During or after reading In the Woods, I started reading (but didn't finish) Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature. One line jumped out of me as he was philosophizing about it, "In the woods is perpetual youth." While Emerson spoke of men returning to that mentality and remembering that happy time of their life and feeling freedom, I saw it as tragic when looking back at French's story since Rob's last memories of his friends being alive are when they were in the woods, dealing with the issue of one of them being sent to a different school.    

Theories En Masse

I appreciated the book exploring what seemed to be all possibilities of what happened to Rob's childhood friends. From animals to local teens to kidnappers, I felt like I was involved in the investigation since I was trying to use the information the book gave me and puzzle out the solution to the point where my theories would later come up. All that was missing was an actual solution to give readers closure.

What Women Put Up with

It was nice to see a real example of the ridiculousness women put up with from men. The Murder Squad is small and gossipy. When the men on the Squad see that Rob and Cassie partner up at work, change desks to sit near each other and take smoke breaks together, they ask Rob is he's shagging her and want to know if she's a goer, as well. Then, the men get it into their heads that she and Rob aren't in a sexual relationship and immediately assume she's a lesbian. To add insult to injury, Rob's narration adds:

I have always considered Cassie to be very clearly feminine, but I could see how, to a certain kind of mind, the haircut and the lack of make-up and the boys'-department corduroys would add up to Sapphic tendencies. (p. 25)

As I will mention in the "Rob" section below, he makes superficial judgements of people's thinking and personality based on their clothes. Additionally, being "very clearly feminine" whether true or not, is not a clear indicator of one's sexual orientation. It's amazing and frustrating how people always want to assume that men and women hanging out together means they are having sexual relations.

In order to stop the Squad from continually gossiping about her sexual orientation, Cassie wears a "strapless black velvet dress" to the Christmas party and brings "a bullishly handsome rugby player" who was actually her married second cousin. 

Photo by Martin Lopez

What I Didn't Like

Rob

Readers are immediately introduced to Rob in Chapter 1 since he is our narrator. But he goes one step further by talking about being a detective, that he may seek out the truth in his job, but he also lies. It's unclear if he solely lies in his job or if he is hinting that he is an unreliable narrator. As the story goes on, it is clear that he is unreliable and carries biases. 

The way in which Rob narrates shows what he values and how he sees the world (women in particular). He gave me the impression of a 1940s, sexist film noir detective who likes to wear the sharp clothes, smokes and drinks while keeping all his emotions in for fear of looking less of a man (which is an outdated and untrue way of thinking). Right on the first page, Rob mentions a time when he was interviewing a suspect and he judges her based on her appearance: 

...she is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor. (p. 5)

Rob evoked such strong feelings from me throughout the book that I applaud French for doing a great job of writing him. While I can't stand him, Rob definitely needs therapy from his experience as a child and overall. He admits that he is attracted to women who annoy him, which 1) I don't think will lead to healthy relationships and 2) when he says this, he's only annoyed with Cassie (who he hasn't spoken to yet) because he's making an assumption about her choice of clothing and how it doesn't match his expectations. He even says that the work dress code is "unspoken." He later finds out that she is wearing those clothes because she is still in recovery from her undercover case where her suspect stabbed her. Thankfully, Rob feels embarrassed and acknowledges that he was in the wrong for judging her.

Rob does not know how to treat women or how to have a healthy relationship. Once he and Cassie have intercourse, he does not immediately regret sleeping with her; it's only later when they both get up and he sees Cassie:

She looked very beautiful that day, tousled and full-lipped, her eyes still and mysterious as a daydreaming child's, and this new radiance [...] made me uneasy somehow.

[...]

I knew, you see, that I had just made at least one of the biggest mistakes of my life. [...] Even if it hadn't been against regulations, I couldn't even manage to eat or sleep or buy toilet bleach, I was lunging at suspects and blanking on the stand [...] the thought of trying to be someone's boyfriend, with all the attendant responsibilities and complications, made me want to curl up in a ball and whimper. (p. 402-403)   

So, instead of voicing his feelings to Cassie where they can decide how to deal with this together or put it on hold for now as they continue working together, he leaves her place right away and distances himself as much as he can while they continue to work on the case. Rob goes even further and shows how horrid he is and how much he needs therapy: 

If Cassie had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn't forgive her for being hurt. (p. 408)

Poor Cassie is forced to draw her own conclusions about Rob's behavior and may even have felt used by him. She is a human being and deserves to feel her feelings. It's no wonder Cassie loses faith in him and turns to Sam, who treats her better.

Cassie

While Cassie makes more sense than Rob in general, she's not perfect. Rob is majorly sexist, and Cassie adds to his problematic character when she complains about how long Rob takes to get going, for example:

At the end of the shift she waited for me, bitching to the air about how long I took to get my things together ('It's like hanging out with Sarah Jessica Parker. Don't forget your lip-liner, sweetie, we don't want the chauffeur to have to go back for it again'). (p. 24)

It is instances like this that make them a good pair, but it doesn't last. Rob and Cassie's relationship at the beginning is explained by referencing Mulder and Scully from The X-Files.

Assuming

Once Cooper has informed Rob and Cassie about the sexual assault from Kathy Devlin's autopsy, they both assume a man is responsible. I found this very narrow-minded on their parts because a woman/girl could have done the assault with an implement and/or been involved, which the latter turned out to be true.   

Photo by cottonbro studio

Description Inconsistency

One of Rob's childhood friends, Jamie, is described as having platinum blonde hair in a bob cut, but she's depicted as a long-haired brunette on the cover.

The Ending

So, the story of what happened to Rob's childhood friends is never resolved. We never find out if his friends died in the woods with their spirits still there or if they were brought elsewhere. We don't know:

• Who took the kids
• Why someone took the kids
• How many people were involved
• If the culprits were locals and/or if they are still living there when Rob and Cassie investigate
• Where the bodies are if the kids were murdered
• If the kids were murdered and then buried in the woods
• If either of Rob's friends survived and also experienced amnesia but is living somewhere else in the world.
• If Rob, who is an unreliable narrator with amnesia, was responsible for his friends' disappearances/deaths.

There is a scene where Rob is driving with Cassie in the passenger's seat, and he is surprised by what might have been a dark animal. Rob ponders whether an animal could have been what killed his friends, but then their bodies, skeletons and/or clothing would have been found, so I doubt that's it. The idea of an animal or monster being the culprit is scary and makes for an interesting story, but it doesn't answer all the questions.

Readers are doubly disappointed when Rob and Cassie botch the case because he believed Rosalind when she told him she was 18 years old (which meant she'd be tried as an adult rather than a juvenile and her confession would have been admissible) and Cassie didn't trust Rob to tell him very early on in the case that Rosalind fits the clinical definition of a psychopath. The case is resolved but lacks the sense of satisfaction because Rosalind's confession is inadmissible and her lies about Cassie threatening her during the interrogation and sleeping with Rob persist; to add insult to injury, their boss is upset that Rob (and Cassie) didn't confess that Rob was the boy from the decades-old Knocknaree case that was semi-connected to their current one; Rob would have been taken off of it immediately because it's a conflict of interest.  

Comparing In the Woods to a Cozy Mystery

Not all mystery novels are written the same way. A cozy mystery is written in a succinct and condensed manner that has less emotional impact and realism. In the Woods is a mystery, but it's also a thriller and categorized as psychological fiction. 

Let's take a look at the interview process of In the Woods and Murder is Binding by Lorna Barrett.  

Two differences we see right away are that Murder is Binding is written from the third person limited since we're in third person, but the narration is filtered through Tricia and focused on her rather than being omniscient; In the Woods is in the first-person perspective narrated by Rob, so he gives readers many more details about environments, atmospheres and characters as he experiences them.

When Rob and Cassie go to the Devlin household to tell the family that Katy is dead, their reactions are much like that of the real world with the parents trying to grapple with the news: 

'Are you sure?' Devlin snapped. His eyes were huge. 'How can you be sure?'

[...]

Devlin swung towards the window, away again, pressed a wrist against his mouth, lost and wild-eyed. 'Oh God,' said Margaret. 'Oh God, Jonathan—" (p. 64)

When Tricia is interviewed by the Sheriff in Murder is Binding, there is a levity to the situation even though moments before, she was in a fire and found a dead body. Her sister is more concerned about Tricia's odor, trying to spray her with perfume while Tricia is calm and answering the Sheriff's questions. One of the suspects, Bob Kelly, enters the shop to learn what has happened:

Stunned, Bob's mouth dropped open in horror. "Murder? Good grief! Ten years of Stoneham being named the safest town in all of New Hampshire... down the drain." A parade of other emotions soon cascaded across his face: irritation and despair taking center stage.

[...]

"Doris?" he repeated in disbelief. (p. 21)

While no one in Murder is Binding is terribly close to Doris, the murder victim, like in In the Woods, readers can see how limited the description is for Bob's reactions compared to the parents of Katy Devlin above. Their reactions are prolonged with the mention of facial expressions, speech and hesitations, as well as bodily movements.

Photo by Polina Zimmerman

Conclusion

I did not like this book because of Rob as a character, the lack of justice for Katy and the unresolved case of what happened to Rob's friends. It was interesting to read the mystery and investigation parts, but the mood was incredibly depressing. As I was reading this book, I could definitely see it more as a TV show or movie (as it advertises on the cover), but they thankfully changed details because people watching a series would not be happy with this book's ending.

The Dublin Murder Squad series continues without Rob and focuses on Cassie and Sam in The Likeness, but since the two mysteries of In the Woods book didn't end well (or at all), I'm not interested in reading the next book. Overall, the book was a major downer for me, but I may read other works by French.

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