In the Woods

In the Woods is a mystery novel by the writer Tana French, published in 2007. It is the first book in her Dublin Murder Squad series, and it won a run of first-novel awards, including an Edgar Award.

The novel opens in the summer of 1984, when three children go into woods near a Dublin suburb and only one comes back, gripping a tree, his shoes full of blood and no memory of the hours before. Twenty years later that boy is Rob Ryan; he now works as a detective with the Dublin murder squad, and nobody he works with knows about his past.

When the body of a twelve-year-old girl is found in the same woods, Rob and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are put on the case. Rob keeps his connection to the place hidden even as the investigation pulls him back into it.

The book is told in Rob's voice, and it is as concerned with how much he can be trusted as with the crime itself. French built the series so that the narrator changes with each book, and the second, The Likeness, follows Cassie; the first two were adapted for television in 2019.