In the Woods

This is an amazing piece of work, taut, persuasive, and intricately constructed to stunning effect. On a summer evening in 1984 in a Dublin suburb, three 12-year-old best friends disappeared. One was eventually found in the woods alive but utterly traumatized, with amnesia, and shoes full of blood; the other two are never seen or heard of again. Twenty years later, the shattered boy, now a homicide detective in Dublin known as Rob Ryan, is assigned the case of a 12-year-old murdered girl found in the same wood. Steven Crossley does an expert job of creating and sustaining with harrowing precision Ryan's inner and outer lives as the case creates something of a fugue state for him, and for the reader. A dazzling performance. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

March 12, 2007
Irish author French expertly walks the line between police procedural and psychological thriller in her debut. When Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old girl from Knocknaree, a Dublin suburb, is found murdered at a local archeological dig, Det. Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, must probe deep into the victim's troubled family history. There are chilling similarities between the Devlin murder and the disappearance 20 years before of two children from the same neighborhood who were Ryan's best friends. Only Maddox knows Ryan was involved in the 1984 case. The plot climaxes with a taut interrogation by Maddox of a potential suspect, and the reader is floored by the eventual identity and motives of the killer. A distracting political subplot involves a pending motorway in Knocknaree, but Ryan and Maddox are empathetic and flawed heroes, whose partnership and friendship elevate the narrative beyond a gory tale of murdered children and repressed childhood trauma.