It's high summer in the countryside just outside Dublin, "a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s". The sun is hot, cows graze along the verges, the ancient woods are a lush playground for children who run wild from morning till tea time. For three 12-year-olds, inseparable friends Jamie, Adam and Peter, there will be no coming of age.
After they fail to come home for their tea, police are eventually called, and a search of the woods finds only Adam, catatonic, his shoes filled with blood. The other children are never found.
Twenty years later, Adam returns to the scene of the crime. On an August day much like the one that cut off his childhood so abruptly, he and his partner in the murder squad are sent to investigate the killing of a 12-year-old girl whose body has been found in an archaeological dig on the edge of what remains of the woods.
He has become a detective, he says, not because he wants to solve the mystery of what happened to Jamie and Peter, but because he was drawn to the cold, authoritative manner of the men who investigated his friends' disappearance. However, getting close to the shadows and smells of that lost afternoon provokes not a cool appraisal of events, but a jittery haunting, an unravelling, a loss of his moral compass.
Actor turned author Tana French's prize-winning debut novel captures the sun-dappled idyll of an Irish holiday and locks it into an irretrievably damaged past. The detectives' pursuit of the killer leads them tantalisingly close to the historical crime, while it becomes increasingly clear that Adam will not be able to handle the truth, should he uncover it.
The detectives' enquiries lead them into aspirational suburban homes as tidy as they are emotionally disordered. They discover neighbours divided by plans to build a road right through the ancient woodland. The picture of small-town Ireland disfigured by political corruption is intriguing, but the novel's driving force is the relationship between the two detectives: Adam, smart and funny but faking it, and Cassie – brave, genuine and kind. Their friendship grows like the August countryside: too intensely gorgeous to last. His traumatic past has left a crack in his personality that will ultimately prove destructive.
French's hugely successful start has been followed by a series of taut and engaging thrillers. In The Woods is the perfect holiday read: from its opening pages, that lost summer of childhood is perilously close.
