In the Woods

It's hard when you start a book and it feels so promising only for you to get to a point about two-thirds through where you're begging for it to be over. That's what happened for me with In the Woods.

I am an avid mystery and suspense reader. I find the genre fascinating and engrossing. I admire the ways that different authors use the same old tricks and still manage to thrill me. And I know why I am attracted to the genre in the first place: in a chaotic and disturbing world, I long for order and justice.

Most of In the Woods consisted of two things I love: mystery and Ireland. I thought for most of the book that I knew what I was reading. But two-thirds of the way through the book something slid into place, and I realized I had been led astray—but not by a red herring or unreliable narrator.

The main character, at first someone I tolerated or at least moderately felt for, became whiney and melodramatic in an all-too-familiar way. He made misogynistic assumptions. He made excuses for his wrong actions that demanded sympathy but offered none to anyone else in return. Except for one person in particular...

That's when it hit me. The novel was suddenly, obviously hard-boiled. The conventions all clicked into place and I knew exactly how the book was going to end, with no surprises.

Other reviewers complained about a memorable paragraph at the end of the book where the narrator admits he was tricked, then excuses himself by adding “but so were you.” (No, actually, I wasn't.) It was frustrating. It wasn't the trick itself—that's why we read the genre in the first place, to be tricked—but that the real trick was something else entirely. The author bounced from the classic detective subgenre, to crime procedure, to supernatural thriller, only to land fully in predictable, melodramatic hard-boiled territory. Joke's on you.

What comes with that territory? A self-destructive anti-hero, speculation on the untrustworthiness of women, and irritating loose ends. At least when you go into a hard-boiled novel you expect that, but I found it to be the trick in this one. Maybe that was my mistake.