Their friendship grows like the August countryside: too intensely gorgeous to last. The picture of small-town Ireland disfigured by political corruption is intriguing, but the novel's driving force is the relationship between the two detectives: Adam, smart and funny but faking it, and Cassie – brave, genuine and kind. They discover neighbours divided by plans to build a road right through the ancient woodland. The detectives' enquiries lead them into aspirational suburban homes as tidy as they are emotionally disordered.

The detectives' pursuit of the killer leads them tantalisingly close to the historical crime, while it becomes increasingly clear that Adam will not be able to handle the truth, should he uncover it. However, getting close to the shadows and smells of that lost afternoon provokes not a cool appraisal of events, but a jittery haunting, an unravelling, a loss of his moral compass.Īctor turned author Tana French's prize-winning debut novel captures the sun-dappled idyll of an Irish holiday and locks it into an irretrievably damaged past. He has become a detective, he says, not because he wants to solve the mystery of what happened to Jamie and Peter, but because he was drawn to the cold, authoritative manner of the men who investigated his friends' disappearance. On an August day much like the one that cut off his childhood so abruptly, he and his partner in the murder squad are sent to investigate the killing of a 12-year-old girl whose body has been found in an archaeological dig on the edge of what remains of the woods. Twenty years later, Adam returns to the scene of the crime.

In the woods french tana