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In the woods by Tana French
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In the woods (original 2007; edition 2007)

by Tana French

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10,148581713 (3.78)745
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:

A gifted voice in psychological suspense, Tana French delivers a mesmerizing debut thriller. After a 12-year-old Irish lad and his two pals fail to return from a day in the woods, searchers find only the terrified sixth graderâ??with blood-filled shoes and no memory of what happened. Now 32, the tragedy's sole survivor Rob Ryan is a detective on Dublin's Murder Squad. A current investigation takes Rob to the exact site of his childhood trauma. With the present case chillingly similar to his 20-year-old nightmare, Rob hopes to unlock the shrouded secrets of his past.… (more)

Member:sarah4uk
Title:In the woods
Authors:Tana French
Info:New York : Viking, 2007.
Collections:calibre
Rating:
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Work Information

In the Woods by Tana French (2007)

  1. 181
    The Likeness by Tana French (2810michael)
  2. 82
    Faithful Place by Tana French (ijustgetbored)
  3. 40
    Haunted Ground by Erin Hart (mikedraper)
    mikedraper: Irish setting, good characters and well written
  4. 10
    Sister by Rosamund Lupton (kraaivrouw)
  5. 10
    Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (sturlington)
  6. 10
    A Memory of Murder by Nichelle Seely (alhall)
  7. 00
    This Body of Death by Elizabeth George (cometahalley)
  8. 00
    Gallows Hill by Rory O'Brien (msouliere)
  9. 00
    The End of Everything by Megan Abbott (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: Missing persons cases drive these lyrical, richly detailed novels that blend Mystery and Psychological Fiction to explore family secrets, childhood friendships, and the loss of innocence. First-person narration heightens suspense by calling into question the reliability of memory.… (more)
  10. 00
    In the Forest by Edna O'Brien (Nickelini)
    Nickelini: Murder mysteries set in forests of Ireland, although otherwise not very similar.
  11. 00
    Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran (sturlington)
  12. 01
    Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: These psychological suspense novels feature characters who, as young children, witness horrible crimes and must now revisit their painful pasts to discover the truth. The stories are fast paced, chilling, and atmospheric.
  13. 02
    Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Ling.Lass)
    Ling.Lass: Unreliable narrators, psychopaths, unsympathetic characters who miss their chance at redemption
  14. 03
    December by Phil Rickman (ehines)
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» See also 745 mentions

English (563)  Spanish (7)  German (4)  Dutch (3)  Swedish (1)  Danish (1)  All languages (579)
Showing 1-5 of 563 (next | show all)
Edgar award winning for the quality of the characters and the story and yet, i did not feel good reading it. Perhaps a bit too real to be enjoyable escape reading ( )
  cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |
Good book. Awesome detail and the relationships were pretty good. Saw the 'bad guy' coming before the reveal, but it was still good. ( )
  cmpeters | Feb 2, 2024 |
Struggling with how to rate this. A bit slow to start for me but then compelling and then frustrating. I liked it enough that I'll read another on the series before deciding on this author.

Overall it had a dark and gloomy feel to me but that makes sense for book focused on a child's murder and the disappearance of two others.

I want to know more. I think that means I liked it! ( )
  hmonkeyreads | Jan 25, 2024 |
Does what a detective story is supposed to do, which is to be gripping and have a good ending. Plenty of the peripheral stuff is I would say not particularly plausible, but what can you do. ( )
  aleshh | Jan 12, 2024 |
This novel takes a bit to get going, but once it does you're sucked into a really great mystery novel. The character are flawed but still very real and you find yourself caring about what's happening to them, asking yourself why they are making decisions that are obviously bad, and annoyed when you don't get the ending you've been waiting for since page one. Even better, Tana French immerses us into modern Ireland; a country that continues to ride the Celtic Tiger economy while dealing with all that implies. There are two issues I have with the novel. First, the author basically gives us two plots and gives equal time to both; however, only one of those plots ever reaches any sort of conclusion and the one we most want to see solved is left open ended. Second, while the other plot is resolved it's resolved in way that was very annoying and a major letdown. Maybe the author thought she was being different but ending the novel this way, but it didn't work. No, I don't think every novel has to conclude with everything nicely tidied up, but when I turned the last page I was just left with a feeling of disappointment. Still, it's great novel, especially for an author's first published work. ( )
  b00kdarling87 | Jan 7, 2024 |
Showing 1-5 of 563 (next | show all)
Although she overburdens the traditional police-procedural form with the weight of romance, psychological suspense, social history and mythic legend, she sets a vivid scene for her complex characters, who seem entirely capable of doing the unexpected. Drawn by the grim nature of her plot and the lyrical ferocity of her writing, even smart people who should know better will be able to lose themselves in these dark woods.
 

» Add other authors (12 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Tana Frenchprimary authorall editionscalculated
Wang, JenniferCover artistmain authorsome editionsconfirmed
Crossley, StevenNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Resnick, NancyDesignersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
"Probably just somebody's nasty black poodle. But I've always wondered... What if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn't worth it?"
-- Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day
Dedication
For my father, David French,
and my mother, Elena Hvostoff-Lombardi
First words
Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s.
Quotations
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this--two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.
To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," he told me reproachfully.
Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (2)

Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:

A gifted voice in psychological suspense, Tana French delivers a mesmerizing debut thriller. After a 12-year-old Irish lad and his two pals fail to return from a day in the woods, searchers find only the terrified sixth graderâ??with blood-filled shoes and no memory of what happened. Now 32, the tragedy's sole survivor Rob Ryan is a detective on Dublin's Murder Squad. A current investigation takes Rob to the exact site of his childhood trauma. With the present case chillingly similar to his 20-year-old nightmare, Rob hopes to unlock the shrouded secrets of his past.

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Book description
As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.

Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.

Richly atmospheric and stunning in its complexity, In the Woods is utterly convincing and surprising to the end.
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