In the Woods by Tana French is one of my favorite mysteries ever. It’s set in Ireland, where three children disappear overnight in the woods behind their homes. The next day one of them is discovered clinging to a tree, scratched and bloody, with no memory of what happened. The other two are never found.
The surviving boy grows up to be a detective who is tasked with investigating the murder of a young girl in those same woods. Is this latest murder tied to the one from twenty years before? Will Detective Ryan ever figure out what happened to his childhood friends?
The appeal of this book is not only in the complex plot and the carefully drawn characters, but also in the masterful way that French describes a scene, a smell, a thought. She has an amazing power to string together ordinary words to create powerful descriptions. There were sentences I read two and three times just to savor the beautiful language.
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Frances Aylor 