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International Noir Fiction: Tana French (and is Benjamin Black actually John Banville when he's slumming?): a crime novel from Ireland that was preceded by p.r. and reviews that tout it as a 'literary crime novel'... All that p.r. and some of the reviews made French's novel sound like a dark, brooding Gothic thriller, which it isn't. It's for the most part a straightforward 'policier'.
Rob's chatty manner takes the story over after a florid opening chapter (fortunately--I'm not sure I could have stuck with the overheated prose of the novel's beginning, which is much more Gothic than the body of the book).less of overheated prose than in The Likeness. opening & closing dramatics: "this is not my story." and "sometimes I still dream I am in __ House." eh.
The "current" story involves the body of a young girl discovered on a prehistoric, sacrificial stone in the middle of an archaeological dig that is hurrying its task in advance of road construction. The archaeologists, the murdered girl's family, and local developers come under suspicion, but no evidence points clearly to any of them. good sum. the detectives enumerate the possibilities as 1) perv crime 2) family 3) threat from developers to the dad who chairs a Move the Motorway campaign. French's book fortunately concentrates on the procedural aspects of the investigation, along with the detectives' struggle against depression as the case moves forward without success over the course of a month.
I want to address a complaint made by several of the people who have posted reviews on Amazon. The ending does not wrap up some of the threads of the tale, and that has confounded and annoyed some readers--if this is a mystery, why isn't everything tied up in a neat bundle at the end? And if this is not a mystery in that sense, is that because it's really a literary novel in disguise (or slumming as a detective story)? While there is a sophisticated structure underlying the book, I didn't get the sense that it was condescending to the genre. But the oblique clues to the unresolved parts of the story have a metaphysical tone ~? a monster in the woods - some sort of beast seen by teenagers Jonathan (Shades) & Cathal (Metallica) & Sandra - and then by Ryan on his night in the woods remembering - and there is the mention, maybe by the older woman they talk to of a ~Piddy, a mischief making ancestor of Puck - but there is only that one mention, no other recall to it given us in Ryan's thoughts or anything~ that you have to take on whatever terms you are willing to do so--French does not tell you how far to go in accepting that aspect of the book at face value, or even how far she's willing to assert it.

az- on Page 217: "My mammy, may she rest in peace... she always said it was the pooka took them. But she was fierce old-fashioned, God love her." This one took me by surprise. The pooka is an ancient child-starer out of legend, a wild mischief-making descendant of Pan and ancestor of Puck. He had not been on Kiernan and McCabe's list of persons of interest. "No, they went into the river, or otherwise your lot would have found the bodies..."

I liked the book much more than I anticipated, and followed it closely through a long-ish 400+ pages without it seeming too long. I'd appreciate hearing from others who've read this one--do you think it measures up as a crime novel? or does it seem pretentious in its literary ambitions?

-What puzzles me a bit about the reviews of "In the Woods" is the absence of attention to the person at the novel's gravitational center (neither of the two detectives, at least in my view). This person (to remain unidentified, in order not to spoil things) seems to me one of the scariest, most dangerously sociopathic figures in recent fiction. How come what he/she manages to do to everyone around gets left aside in discussions of the book's other, extraordinary character portraits? (So yes, it has strong literary qualities as well as being a page-turner of a mystery.)
--All the reviewers are tiptoeing around the psychopath you mention because to say anything at all is to spoil the mystery or the reading experience or however you would characterize the process of a crime story unveiling itself. Plus the psychopathic depth of this character's actions are only revealed at the end--part of the nature of a narrator embedded in the story (another aspect of the carefully constructed armature of the novel). So in a way, the surface level of the novel doesn't deal with that psycho, the reader can only ferret out that character between the lines, or retrospective see that character operating in the shadows of the novel. Maybe in that sense, that character is the emblem of the unsolved mystery and the metaphysical overtones--a novelistic metaphysics, to put a probably too grand name to it...
-Dont you get it.....Ryan did the original murders and that is why he blocks out what happened....
--Anonymous thinks that the novel is a puzzle to be solved, and that the answer is Ryan as the murderer in the old case (the murder of his 2 childhood friends). I think the novel is more than a puzzle, and the obvious possibility that Ryan murdered his friends is no more certain (or essential to the novel) than the other possibilities, criminal or metaphysical. gosh I didn't give this much thought ~ Ryan realizes the possibility late in the book, thinks of a look Cassie gave him after talking to one of the detectives on the old case, a look like she was holding something back. but no, I don't think there was any strong suggestion that this is what happened. anyway we get no sense of a motive for him.