The Searcher by Tana French: A review

 

Critics and readers in general often assign Tana French to the niche of crime fiction writers, but that really undervalues her art. Her novels could be more accurately described as thoughtful literary fiction in which a crime takes place. That has never been more true than in her latest novel, The Searcher. 

Several critics have noted the debt this particular novel owes to the classic Western movies, particularly collaborations between John Ford and John Wayne. The very title of the book is a nod to the Ford/Wayne movie "The Searchers." But there may be just a touch of "The Quiet Man" here, too, in the American who moved to western Ireland and became a part of the local scene in a small village. 

The American here is Cal Hooper, a Chicago cop for twenty-five years. Cal has just endured a rancorous divorce and his adult daughter has moved to Seattle. There seems to be nothing keeping him in Chicago except the job. A job from which he is eligible to retire. And that's exactly what he does. He invests in a fixer-upper cottage in a bucolic Irish village and moves there to set about repairing and upgrading it. It seems the perfect escape for the quiet life that he envisions. He gets acquainted with his neighbors, makes himself known at the local pub, and generally goes about settling into his new life.

Then his cop sense begins to twitch. He begins to suspect that someone is watching him, even to the point of looking in his windows at night. He sets a trap by spreading smooth soil under his windows to capture footprints of the suspected interloper. And sure enough, in the morning, there they are - proof that someone was spying on him.

He stays alert over the next several days and finally, his stalker shows up.  It's a kid - a thirteen-year-old named Trey. Trey comes from a hardscrabble family living on the mountain adjacent to Cal's place. There are six kids in the family and a mother trying to keep them all fed and together. The father is nowhere to be found. Some months earlier, the oldest child, a boy named Brendan, had disappeared. No one has heard from him since and there seems no clue as to where he has gone or if he is still alive. Trey thinks he was kidnapped and wants Cal to find out what happened.

Cal doesn't want to get involved, but once again that cop sense kicks in and he feels a need to solve this mystery. Also, he's becoming attached to Trey who helps him with chores around his place. His conversations with the child inevitably lead him to start asking questions. And that's when he begins to suspect that there are hidden layers to life in this quiet village and that there are dangerous secrets that he would be wise not to disturb. Cal's neighbor, Mart, who had taken the American under his wing and eased his entry to the village delivers an oblique warning that Cal is about to poke a hornet's nest. The warning doesn't take. As Cal goes about asking his inconvenient questions, the reader has a growing sense of dread that this is not going to end well for him or for Trey. 

French builds her plot ever so slowly and carefully with full attention paid to the beauty of the Irish landscape and to the insularity of village life. She makes us feel Cal's loneliness as he longs for his daughter, feeling that perhaps something is wrong in her life but unable to discover what it might be or do anything about it. He even misses being able to discuss things with his ex, Donna. And he begins to suspect that his neighbors are not to be fully trusted.

Some critics have complained that this book is very different from French's Dublin Murder Squad series or her most recent book, The Witch Elm, and they seem disappointed with it for that reason. To which I reply, yes, it is different and why on Earth would you require a talented writer to write variations on the same story every time out? This is a story in which right and wrong are not simple and they are definitely not black and white. These characters' lives are filled with gray areas and morality is a complex issue. It is a narrative that gives the reader much to consider, the kind of thing that one would expect of the best literary fiction.

I liked Cal Hooper quite a lot. Maybe I even fell in love with him a little bit. And Trey is a marvelous and ambiguous character. I did not want my time with them to end. This rates right up there with my favorite French novels. Her artistry and creativity are in full flower.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

The Witch Elm by Tana French: A review

Wow! Just...wow. That woman can write!

Not that this was a new discovery. After all, I had read all of Tana French's six previous books, each of them a part of the "Dublin Murder Squad" series. There's not a bad book among them and I had been looking forward to number seven. I was disappointed when I read a few months ago that her next book would be a stand-alone mystery, not part of the series. I needn't have worried. 

In The Witch Elm, Tana French has surpassed herself, in my opinion. I think this is her best book yet. And although it doesn't have the members of the Dublin Murder Squad as characters and narrators, it does feature some Dublin police detectives as integral parts of the plot.

Our narrator here is one Toby Hennessy. He is the public relations handler for a small Dublin art gallery. He is a young man who has built his life on his ability to charm his way into and out of situations. The first sentence of his narrative is, "I've always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person." 

Luck is a recurring theme throughout the book, both its presence and the lack of it. It could, in fact, be seen as a meditation upon the source of luck: Is it something that is bred in the bone, or is it something that is bestowed by some outside force?

As we meet Toby, the art gallery's current show features some street artists, some of them homeless, "skangers," as the Irish slang would call them. One of the skanger-artists is called Gouger and seems to show some particular talent, but maybe not quite enough. A gallery employee, Tiernan, decides to help things along by touching up the artist's work to make it more interesting and salable. Toby catches him at it but keeps quiet. Then the gallery owner discovers the fraud and fires Tiernan but keeps Toby on. There's that luck again.

Soon after, Toby goes home to his apartment and sometime during the night his home is burgled, and when he wakes up and discovers the two invaders ransacking his living room, they beat him within an inch of his life.

Sometime later, he wakes up in the hospital with gaps in his memory, a drooping eyelid, a limp, aphasia, and PTSD. As he regains consciousness, a doctor comes to check on him and tells him, "You were very lucky."

Recovery is a very halting process, but he is attended throughout by his saint of a girlfriend, Melissa. He is visited repeatedly by two detectives who are investigating the case. They search for clues in his relationships. Who had he offended? Who had reason to hate him? They don't seem to be making any progress, but one of the detectives tells him that he always gets his man in the end.

But all of this is merely prelude. It is not even the main story of The Witch Elm.  

Toby has a beloved uncle named Hugo who has never married and still lives in the family home called Ivy House, a place where Toby and his cousins spent idyllic summers when they were growing up. It transpires that Hugo has been diagnosed with brain cancer. He only has a few months to live and he needs someone with him at all times. Since Toby is the member of the family not presently working and who has plenty of time on his hands, he and Melissa take up residence in Ivy House, living with and caring for Hugo.

Every Sunday, the entire family descends on Ivy House for family luncheon. The children of the family play in the enclosed back garden and in that back garden is a 200-year-old elm tree, a wych elm. While playing on the tree, as luck would have it, one of the children finds a human skull tucked into a hole in the tree. The police are called in and soon an entire skeleton is unearthed and, at length, is identified as that of a young man, an acquaintance of Toby and his cousins, who had been thought to have committed suicide by drowning ten years before, although his body had never been recovered. How his skeleton came to be in the tree and his relationships with the cousins in the last summer before his death make up the main story of the book.

The two cousins who play important roles in this story are Susanna, who was a nerdy teenager who grew into a bit of a wild-child and then chucked it all to become a suburban wife and mother; and Leon, a gay teenager dealing with the prejudices and taunts of his peers who grew into an "I'm-gay-so-deal-with-it" young adult. Their teenage experiences are central to the story French tells us.

That story is one of literary mystery/suspense. The most compelling parts of it for me were the relating of the casual sexual harassment that was a part of these teenagers' lives and how it affected the course of their lives; it was so integral to their experiences in that fateful summer that it wasn't even noticed. It wasn't remarked upon. It was just an accepted part of the landscape of being a vulnerable teenager. (Perhaps the current political situation in our country has made me extra sensitive to such storylines, but it seems that every book that I read these days speaks to the subject of sexism and misogyny.)

The two detectives assigned to the skeleton in the tree case doggedly pursue their investigation, returning again and again to interview Toby about his relationship with the victim. The problem is that Toby can't remember much. He seems to have been a pretty oblivious teenager and since the attack his memory is shot anyway. He struggles to recall anything from that summer.

French builds her case and the tension with slow but inexorable force. The denouement when it comes is both unexpected and, upon reflection, perfectly inevitable. And it is brilliant. What will she ever do to top this one?

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

The Trespasser by Tana French: A review

When this book came out last year, I read a review of it and knew immediately that I wanted to read The Trespasser. The problem was that it was the sixth in a series. 

Now, we know that I am constitutionally unable to start a series in the middle or at the end, so I set about to read the preceding five books, in their order of publication.  In May, I finished book number five, The Secret Place, in which detectives Antoinette Conway and Stephen Moran are featured. Finally, I was ready for the book that I had wanted to read in the first place.

Let me just state up front that The Trespasser was worth the wait. In fact, in my opinion, it is the best of the lot.

When we join the Dublin Murder Squad this time, Conway has been there for perhaps a couple of years, but Moran is still a newbie. He was brought on board on Conway's recommendation after they worked the St. Kilda's School case together. They are now partners and it is basically them against the world. Or at least them against the rest of the Murder Squad.

Conway is the only woman on the squad and she is subject to constant misogynistic harassment of the Good Old Boy type, something that most women who have worked with men can probably identify with to a greater or lesser degree. Conway is tough, but at the time she and Moran are assigned to their latest case, she's just about ready to chuck it all in and go work for a security firm.

The partners, up until now, have mostly been assigned to domestic cases, generally the most easy to solve. Now, a young woman has been found dead in her home with a severely bruised face and her head cracked against the stone of her hearth. 

Aislinn Murray lived alone. She was a beautiful young woman and, at the time of her death, had apparently been preparing a romantic Saturday night dinner for some lucky man. Did the romance turn sour and the man start punching Murray causing her to fall and hit her head and ultimately die? It'll be up to Conway and Moran to find out. They are assigned the case.

Suspicion initially falls on the boyfriend who was going for that romantic dinner, but he swears he never got into the house. Aislinn never answered the door when he rang and he finally decided he had been dumped and went away. He says he had never been in the house at all and there are no fingerprints or other evidence to give the lie to that story.

Nevertheless, one of the detectives assigned to the investigation, Breslin, the old pro who Conway and Moran see as their squad leader's eyes and ears, the one who is to see that they don't go off track, insists that the boyfriend did it and keeps trying to push them in that direction, even though there is the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Meanwhile, the victim's best friend hints at another man, a married man, that Aislinn was involved with, but insists that she doesn't know the details.

And there is another thing that is niggling at Conway's mind. She knows that the victim's face is familiar. She has seen her before. But her record is clean. There is no clue to where and under what circumstances she had met her, and she just can't remember. Until she does.

There are red herrings aplenty in this plot and, while running them to ground, Conway must also deal with the daily petty hassles of the men (or is it really just one man?) who want her off "their" elite squad. It was enough to make me want to punch somebody just reading about it!

I found this book to be so well-crafted that I really cannot find one negative thing to say about it. The characters, both main and secondary, are memorable. They are complex, stubborn, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and appealing. Even Antoinette, who is often irritable and unlikable, is appealing. The pace of the story is sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but that seems intentional, meant to mimic the actual pace of an investigation. Everything, every word, in this book seems intentional and well thought out.

And now, what do I do? I'm left with a sense of melancholy that there are no more Dublin Murder Squad mysteries to read. Tana French needs to get busy with the word processor and give us another. Soon! 

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Secret Place by Tana French: A review

Tana French takes on the fraught atmosphere of a girls' boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin in her fifth entry in the Dublin Murder Squad series. As with the earlier books in the series, this one features a different detective but one that we have met before in an earlier book, Faithful Place, and it includes other characters that we've met before, as well as a new female detective in the Murder Squad, Antoinette Conway.

The detective that we met before is Stephen Moran, who, when we encounter him this time, is working Cold Cases. He is contacted by Holly Mackey, Undercover chief Frank Mackey's daughter, who has information about a murder that took place a year before.

Moran met Holly when she was a nine-year-old and he and his partner were investigating a murder in Faithful Place, where Frank Mackey grew up. Holly is now a 16-year-old and she is attending St. Kilda's School. She is part of a tight-knit group of four girls.

The previous year, a handsome, popular young man from the boys' boarding school next door was killed on St. Kilda's property. His murder was investigated by Antoinette Conway and her partner but they never solved it. Now, Holly brings Stephen a card that she found posted on the school's board called "The Secret Place" where students can post things anonymously. It features a picture of the boy who was killed with the caption, "I know who killed him."

Detective Moran takes the card to the Murder Squad and meets with Detective Conway. She asks him to work with her (she no longer has a partner) and be a fresh pair of eyes on the case to investigate. The two head out to the school to interrogate students once again. The rest of the action in the book takes place on this one single day with flashbacks to the events of the year before.

Most of the investigation is focused on Holly and her three friends and a rival group of four girls. The rival group is the popular clique in the school and Holly and her friends are considered the "freaks."

Recreating the world of teenage girls and their relationships, filled with insecurities, envy, raging hormones, and occasional cruelties must have been a daunting task for French. To accomplish it, she immerses us in teenspeak replete with "OMGs," "awesomesauce," "totes amazeballs," "hello?" at the end of sarcastic statements, and every sentence seems to end with a rising inflection of a question like the stereotypical Valley Girl. Considering the rich inner lives that these girls had, the use of such trite and cliched language was a bit jarring and sometimes downright irritating.

Another thing that irritated me even more about the book was the supernatural aspect to it - the telekinetic powers that some of the girls supposedly had and the appearance of ghosts, none of which really seemed to have a point or to add anything to the plot. The ghosts might be explained by mass hysteria induced in suggestible young people, but still...

The plot was an interesting one. It followed the pattern of French's previous books in that it started ever so slowly and built tension and suspense throughout. I also liked the characters. Conway and Moran made an intriguing team. I wonder if we'll see them again. Holly and her group were a captivating group of teenagers and their relationships with their rivals and with the boys from the neighboring school made for some riveting reading. And in the latter part of the book, we again get to observe Frank Mackey do his thing which is always diverting. But.

But there was just something missing here. It wasn't really up to the high standard that French has set for herself. My initial thought was to award the book three or three-and-a-half stars, but since I don't usually do things by halves and since I am such a generous soul, I decided on four.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 
  

Broken Harbor by Tana French: A review

Okay, I think I'm beginning to get it. Tana French's psychological thrillers all feature damaged characters at their core. Their haunting, unforgettable stories are revealed to the reader slowly, tantalizingly. At the beginning of the books, things seem to move at a glacial pace as we get our footing. Then, all of a sudden, we are hurled into warp speed and struggling to keep our bearings as French plays mind games with us and toys with our expectations. Delicious!

There's another thing that is becoming clear about French's method as well. Each book, after In the Woods, has a different detective at its center, but, in each case, we have met that detective before, usually in the previous book. Broken Harbor has Michael "Scorcher" Kennedy as its narrator and main character, but I had to read the publisher's synopsis of the book to be reminded that Scorcher appeared as a colleague of Undercover Detective Frank Mackey in the last book, Faithful Place. Frankly, I couldn't remember him, but I don't think I'll be forgetting him soon after this book.

Scorcher and his partner, rookie Richie Curran, are assigned to investigate a particularly vicious, brutal crime. In the middle of the night in a subdivision called Brianstown, the picture-perfect middle-class Spain family has been attacked, leaving the young daughter (Emma) and son (Jack) and the father (Pat) dead and the mother (Jenny) barely clinging to life. Arriving at the house, the detectives find a blood soaked scene in the kitchen where the bodies of the parents were found. Otherwise, the house is in perfect order, clean, neat, everything in place. There is one curious thing; throughout the house, there are unexplained holes in the walls, as if something or someone had punched through them.

As the investigation begins, we see all the usual elements of a police procedural: the wrenching autopsies, the forensics team picking up and analyzing clues, the interminable interrogations of suspects and witnesses. But wait! There's more! It becomes a full-on psychological thriller as Scorcher and his team delve into the minds of the perfect family gone wrong.

The family had bought their home in the Irish seaside community of 250 new homes built just for families like them, young, affluent, middle-class, growing. But the community turned out to be built on dreams and nothing much else. After a few years, the shoddily built houses began to have myriad problems, and then the housing boom and the economy went bust and Brianstown became nothing but a half-built ghost town that was nothing like what its builders had promised.

Then, the father in the perfect family lost his job and couldn't find another and their world began its final collapse.   

On a parallel track of the story, we learn that when Scorcher Kennedy was growing up, he and his family used to spend two weeks each summer in the area now called Brianstown - except then it was called Broken Harbor. It was the place where his family, especially his mother, was the happiest. But one summer, his mother walked into the sea there and took her own life. After that, the youngest child, a daughter named Dina, lost her tenuous grip on reality and descended into madness. When we meet her all these years later, Scorcher ("Mikey" as she calls him) and his other sister struggle to care for their youngest sibling and keep her out of an institution. 

It begins to be clear that this novel isn't as much about murder as it is about the fragile human mind and the things that can cause it to go off the rails and slip into deep waters, perhaps irretrievably.  

Meanwhile, the investigation of the murder goes on and it leads the detectives in different directions. First, the evidence points towards one suspect and then another, but it's not clear what either person would have had to gain by murder, especially the murder of children. After a while, the two detectives begin to diverge in their opinions about who committed the murders and Scorcher struggles to keep his investigation on track. I was right there with them, confused all the way, right up until the end.

Tana French seems to have perfected her technique in telling these Dublin Murder Squad stories: Start slowly, sometimes excruciatingly slowly, and patiently lay out all the groundwork for the tale, then move right on to full page-turner mode and keep the reader guessing all the way. She executes that technique flawlessly in Broken Harbor. It's hard to see how she could get any better.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

Faithful Place by Tana French: A review

Faithful Place is the third in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series, and, just like the first two entries, it is a gem.

We met Frank Mackey, the main character here, in the second book, The Likeness. He was the tough head of the Undercover Squad with a single-minded devotion to the job that left little room for emotion. He was not an especially likable character.

This time around, we learn Frank's backstory. We meet the hardscrabble working class family that produced him and we get to know the community where he grew up - Faithful Place in Dublin.

Frank's family represents the very worst of the Irish stereotypical family of the 20th century. The father is a drunken, brutal beast of a man who can't keep a job and spends most of his life on the dole. His mother is a harpy who hides and excuses her and the children's beatings at the hands of her husband because, what would the neighbors think? Actually, of course, the neighbors know only too well what is going on.

Frank is the middle child of five. He has an older brother and sister and a younger brother and sister. Of the five, he's the only one who made it out of Faithful Place.

When Frank was nineteen, he was in love with beautiful Rosie Daly, another Faithful Place denizen. Rosie was eager to get out and see the world and make a better life for herself. She and Frank planned to run away to London. They had to keep it secret from both families who would have opposed and stopped them.

On the night when they planned to leave, Frank packed his bag and sneaked out of the house to go to their designated meeting place to wait for Rosie. She never came.

Finally, Frank went to a derelict house on the street where they sometimes met, thinking there might have been a misunderstanding about the meeting place. There, he found a note from Rosie that seemed to say she was leaving on her own.

Devastated, Frank decided to leave on his own as well. For twenty-two years, he never returned to Faithful Place.

He did make a life of his own. He joined the Guard, eventually ending up in the Undercover Squad. He married and had a daughter and, in time, divorced. When we meet up with Frank this time, his daughter is nine years old and he adores her. He still seems to be hung up on the ex-wife as well.

Over the years, Frank had been in touch with his younger sister, Jackie. Now a call comes from Jackie. Something has been found in that derelict house where Rosie and Frank used to meet. It is Rosie's suitcase - the one she had packed to run away with Frank. It looks like Rosie might never have got out of Faithful Place after all.

The subsequent discovery of Rosie's decomposed body and the upheaval that this causes in the Daly and Mackey families is the central element in the story of Faithful Place. This novel is, in fact, not just a mystery and suspense thriller, it is in large part a reflection on the structure of families, how they work, how they make us who we are, and what we owe to the other members of our families. In the end, although we may run away from the family and make a new life for ourselves elsewhere, we can never truly escape the gravitational pull of that first social group.

Tana French writes splendid and thought-provoking fiction. She also has the knack for constructing an air-tight mystery/thriller that keeps the reader guessing all the way through. I'm already salivating at the thought of reading the next book in this series.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Likeness by Tana French: A review

This book started out as maybe a two-star read if I were feeling generous, but as I kept turning the pages, it kept moving up the scale and, by the time I reached the denouement, I was finding it hard to put it down even for a minute or two.

My first problem with the book was that its premise is just so unbelievable. It strays from the thriller concept straight into the fantastical world of science fiction. 

But as I got further and further into the plot, that ceased to bother me. The characters were so interesting that they moved the story along and built suspense until it finally reached the breaking point.

That unbelievable premise, briefly, is this: Cassie Maddox, one of the detectives on the Dublin Murder Squad that we met in Into the Woods, has now moved on to Domestic Violence after the debacle of the Woods case. Her beloved but now estranged partner, Rob Ryan, was moved into a desk job. 

Even before she worked on the Murder Squad, Cassie had worked in the Undercover division. While there, she and her boss had created a persona for her called Alexandra (Lexie) Madison and she had worked undercover using that name.

Now, Cassie is called to the scene of a murder in the countryside outside of Dublin where she finds Detective Sam O'Neill, another of her former colleagues on the Murder Squad and now her lover, and Frank Mackey from Undercover, the person who created Lexie Madison all those years ago. 

When Cassie is shown the dead body, she is shocked to see a woman who looks very much like her. The murder victim's name, according to her ID, is Alexandra (Lexie) Madison.

It develops that this Lexie Madison was a Ph.D. candidate at the local university and she lived in a house in the countryside, near where she died, with four other Ph.D. candidates. She had lived with them for four years and they were all close friends, functioning very much as a family.

Now Lexie is dead and the police have no clues as to the identity of her murderer. 

But Cassie looks SO much like Lexie that Frank Mackey, the undercover guy who has a streak of sadism, says why don't we keep her death a secret - just say she was injured - and then put Cassie in her place to play Lexie once again and flush out the murderer? 

And Cassie agrees to this!

And all the four friends back at the big house, the friends who have known her for four years and know all of her quirks and habits accept her! They believe she is Lexie!

Can you see why a reader might have a problem with this?

This is a very strange and self-contained group of people who live in a very strange house and provide all of each other's needs for love and friendship and family. The group is not liked or accepted by their neighbors in the village. In fact, they are actively hated and are the victims of vandalism, graffiti, and intimidation. It's very much an us-against-them situation.

Their group provides a feeling of belonging for these outsiders and outcasts. Even Cassie/Lexie finds herself seduced by the warmth of the group. There's nothing that really transcends that feeling, and as the story progresses, we see that that is what it is really about: Paradise found and, eventually, paradise lost.

Tana French builds her story and the tension slowly and, up until late in the book, I was still very much in a quandary as to who killed Lexie. And, maybe even more importantly, who was Lexie? 

In the end, all - well, most anyway - is revealed and we are left wondering what Tana French is going to titillate us with next. 

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Woods by Tana French: A review

How is it that I have never read Tana French? Time to remedy that oversight.

I recently read in The New York Times online a review of French's latest book, The Trespasser. It sounded fascinating and I wanted to read it right away, but then I digested the fact that this is the fifth book in a series and my reader OCD kicked in. Of course, I could not start a series at the end. I am constitutionally unable to do so. One has to start at the beginning. And that's how I came to pick up the first entry in French's Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods.

This book won all kinds of literary awards when it was first published in 2007 and, from my perspective having now finished reading it, all the awards were well-deserved. It is a marvelously well-written book that tells a powerful story through the actions and relationships of interesting if imperfect characters.

The story is told in first person voice by Detective Rob Ryan of the Dublin Murder Squad. He introduces himself to us by saying that he is a seeker after truth and that he lies. It's a description that it is important to keep in mind throughout.

Ryan is hiding a dark secret. Twenty years before, when he was known as Adam Ryan, he was at the center of a mystery involving three children who disappeared one summer evening in woods in a Dublin suburb. Ryan was later found, his body pressed tightly against a tree with his nails dug into the bark. His shoes were full of blood and he was in a near catatonic state. He could not remember what had happened. The two other children were never found and the mystery never solved. Ryan still maintains that he cannot remember what happened and he keeps the secret of his past from his associates and superiors on the Murder Squad. All except his partner and best friend, Detective Cassie Maddox.

Now, a 12-year-old girl's murdered body has been found in those same woods and Ryan and Maddox are assigned to the case. The new murder once again raises questions about what happened in that long-ago case. Could there really be two child murderers in this small town or are the cases somehow related? How and why? These are some of the questions that Maddox and Ryan have to answer.

The girl's body was found in an area where an archaeological dig is taking place in advance of a new roadway being built through the site. Some locals are protesting against the building of the proposed roadway there and it turns out the murdered girl is the daughter of the leader of the protest against the roadway. The detectives must consider the possibility that the murder may be a warning to the protesters.

Weeks go by and the diligence of the Murder Squad has yielded no results. Everyone's nerves are frayed to the breaking point. French does a chilling job of conveying the strain, particularly the strain on the relationship between Ryan and Maddox that heretofore had been rock solid.

When the break finally comes, it is due to an insight by Ryan and yet it seems that he can't see the forest for the trees. (Ach! Please forgive the woods pun! I couldn't resist.) The truth turns out to be even more horrible than anyone - except Maddox who suspected all along - could have imagined.

French's plotting and exposition of this crime fiction/psychological thriller is just brilliant. Her writing shows the skilled hand of someone who one would swear was a much more experienced writer, and yet this is her first book. She set the bar very high for herself. I intend to investigate whether she has lived up to that standard in her succeeding books.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars