In the Woods

⚖The case for it

Rob and Cassie are why people finish this: two detectives whose banter is loyal and funny and earned rather than assembled from a formula, and readers come out saying “there will forever be a Rob Ryan-shaped scar.” French writes Dublin and the woods at its edge as places that press on the case, “richly atmospheric and stunning in its complexity.” Rob is convincingly damaged rather than damaged as a device, in what one reader calls “a story of deep and painfully real psychological f*ckery.” The present-day investigation stands on its own, with real suspects and real motives underneath it.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Six hundred pages, and readers say “at least 100 pages could have been cut,” with “so little happened over so many pages” through the middle. Rob narrates all of them, “rambling on for pages and pages... and pages,” and his treatment of Cassie later on costs him the readers who liked him. A “distracting political subplot involves a pending motorway.” The stylised prologue loses people before the plot starts. Then the ending, which readers fight over harder than everything else combined: one camp calls the payoff withheld after six hundred pages of investment, the other calls that same choice the most honest thing in the book.

— the honest librarian

12h

honest hours

17

sittings