2024 the best of us french series review

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A gorgeously written novel that marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in psychological suspense.

Reviewer: Susan Mills
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A psychological mystery tour-de-force
Review: One of the murder unit detectives questions a suspect, trying to persuade him to implicate himself, in great detail. She tells him that the ones who suffer the most are the ones who never tell anyone. They hold it in and it slowly eats away at them. They become depressed, guilt-ridden, many commit suicide. While she’s telling him this, she thinks to herself that, unfortunately, it’s not true. Of the people who commit bad acts and are never discovered, many go on with their lives. They manage to bury it inside themselves, to ignore it, to persuade themselves it never happened, to convince themselves they’re good people and what they did was right and necessary, or whatever; but they manage just fine.This is a trope for the novel as a wholes and for the main character in particular. Rob Ryan, her partner and friend, is involved in the case they’re investigating up to his neck, but is also living with his own buried memories about what happened when he was 12 years old when two of his friends disappeared in the woods one night, forever, and only he was found, with the blood of his friend in his sneakers. The case they’re working on brings him back to the scene, so the nightmarish case they’re working on throws him headlong into his own repressed memories, which begin to emerge and psychologically torture him. What happens with the memories is one of the two mysteries of the novel. I’m tempted to agree with many people that the lack of resolution to this mystery is frustrating. And so it is. And yet, it also seems very realistic, which in my mind largely redeems French’s choice here. Maybe Ryan can’t live with being conscious of what really happened. Repressing it may just be his best option in order to move on with his life. Which, for sure, has been seriously compromised by those events of his childhood, and their aftermath. The reader wants and hopes and wishes so hard for him to realize something, to overcome his emotional handicaps and right his important relationships. In real life, his struggle, and therefore the reader’s, is likely to be endless. Life is frustrating, and such emotional scars can easily affect us for our entire lives. The book is deeply crafted, well-written, with complex characters and relationships, each with complicated pasts, and the story challenges the reader. That’s a good thing. I did find it overly verbose at times, but this is a minor criticism. One of the best crime mysteries I’ve read. (This is my first read of a Tana French book, so I can’t compare.)

Reviewer: Jill Nicely
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: murder hits close to home
Review: Detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox were the ones who took the call that day, about the archaeologists in the woods who found the body. Even though they were two of the younger detectives on Dublin’s Murder Squad, they were the ones who were available to take the call. They weren’t expecting much. Archaeologists found old bodies sometimes in a dig, a set of bones, and they needed to call the police in. It was just protocol. But when the detectives drove out to Knocknaree, what they found wasn’t some old bones. It was a dead twelve-year-old girl, Katie Devlin, who had just been killed and left in the woods.Rob knew immediately that he should speak up, that he should refuse the case. But the woods called to him. Twenty years previous, he had been a kid named Adam in Knocknaree. He’d been playing in the woods with his friends Jamie and Peter. They’d stayed out way past the time their moms had told them to be home, past tea, past dark. Their parents went to look for them. Everyone went to look for them. They found Adam clinging to a tree, long rips in the back of his t-shirt, his shoes filled with blood. Jamie and Peter were never found.It turns out that Adam was relatively unharmed, the blood in his shoes not his. But the trauma he experienced erased his memory, and it didn’t take long for the town to turn against him. He was sent off to an English boarding school, and his parents moved away from Knocknaree. Adam changed his name to Rob, and made his way onto the Murder Squad. But he still had all of Adam’s questions in his head. What happened that day in the woods? Why was he the only one spared? Or, if it was that his friends had run away, why was he the one left behind? Twenty years of questions, and now another child lost to the woods. He knew he should refuse the case, but how could he?As he and Cassie start to work the case, investigating the family, local politics, possible connections to the case from 20 years ago, Rob finds himself more and more stuck between the present and past, trying desperately to put together the puzzle that will bring Katie’s murderer to justice and to answer his (and the whole town’s) 20-year-old questions.Tana French’s In the Woods is a police procedural masterwork. At over 600 pages (over 20 hours on audio!), this novel covers not only the investigation into a grisly child murder but also the rich inner life of detective Rob Ryan. Each step of the case comes to vivid life with Ryan and a cast of strong, believable characters who look under every rock (literally) in order to figure out who would want this young innocent girl killed. But just as fascinating as following the police is the way we see inside the mind of a grown-up traumatized kid. Rob’s journey from murder detective back to kid whose friends disappeared from the woods, his rescued memories offering clues in bits and pieces, breadcrumbs for him to follow as he tries to find his way home after all those years.I listened to the audio book for this, and narrator Steven Crossley will forever be the voice of Detective Ryan in my mind. I thought his narration was perfection, and though it’s a very long book, Crossley made French’s words sing with meaning and depth, making those 20+ hours fly by.

Reviewer: Skeeter
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Loved this book! The storyline pulls you in, and the insightful study of the human psyche gives this novel pathos and depth. A real treat.

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The descriptions and intricacies of this novel are remarkable. It deserves to be savoured like a fine wine.

Reviewer: Giuseppe Guida
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: it misses tension and it doesnt create any thrills. it lacks of emotions. i was just tempted to skip pages and thats when i thought to stop

Reviewer: anna maria
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Opera prima di questa autrice, è un affresco su una nazione, un romanzo di formazione, un viaggio agli inferi dei detective coinvolti...un crimine orrendo porterà i protagonisti a confrontarsi con i propri demoni ma anche a risolvere il crimine ma nello stesso tempo le loro vite saranno segnate per sempre. Bello, intenso e coinvolgente!

Reviewer: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The book is very gripping and intriguing!Extremely well written plot and well structured!The story stays with you for a while.A good read for sure!