In The Woods by Tana French

OK, so I should not explain what I am reading in previous posts, and then read something totally different! I tend to float around several books for a while, then focus on one that really catches my attention.

One that I picked up and thumbed through, and then read straight through without perusing anything else was In The Woods by Tana French. This book won the Edgar Award (never heard of that award, by the way) for best first novel by an American author.

This book is about three small kids who go missing from the woods in their small Dublin, Ireland town. Two kids are never found, one boy is found, and twenty years later finds himself back in his hometown investigating the murder of a twelve year old girl in the same woods. Detective Ryan has kept his secret for so long, even he does not remember alot of what happened to him on that long ago afternoon with his friends. Detective Ryan and his partner Cassie go to Knocknaree to figure out this crime.

Tana French is a beautiful writer. She has a way of making you feel like you are in the story...the characters are so easy to identify with, you care about them from the first page.

Here is one paragraph that is a good example of what I mean:

"I went to see Cassie testify, though. I sat at the back in the courtroom, which was, unusually, packed; the trial had been filling front pages and talk radio since before it even began. Cassie was wearing a neat little dove-grey suit and her curls were slicked down smoothly against her head. I hadn't seen her in a few months. She looked thinner, more subdued; the quicksilver mobility I associate with her was gone, and her new stillness brought her face home to me - the delicate, marked arches above her eyelids, the wide clean curves of her mouth - as if I had never seen it before. She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that; whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable plains of color and texture, but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones. I watched her on the stand in that unfamiliar suit and thought of the soft hairs on the back of her neck, warm and smelling of the sun, and it seemed an impossible thing to me, it seemed the vastest and saddest miracle of my life: I touched her hair, once."

*sigh*

This book was one to be savored. And I did. I savored every page. It was that good.