I almost missed a couple of meetings because of this book, promising myself I'd leave the house and get downtown, but unable to force myself to stop reading, even starting a new chapter over the cries my Inner German screaming you're late, you're late. It's a good book, a thriller.

In The Woods is about two detectives on a case regarding a murdered child, eerily similar to a murder that happened 20 years earlier on the same spot, involving the detective Rob Ryan at the same age. The book circles around Ryan's relationship with his partner Cassie Maddox, the various suspects, scoundrels and psychopaths they encounter in their work, and, of course, solving the crime. It's a literary thriller with just the right amount of prosiness and just the right amount of plot. And is a great panegyric to the platonic male-female relationship, a girl-boy buddy/police partnership.

There was a Nabokovian moment of reader-taunting after the killer was revealed that annoyed the hell out of me, but besides that, In The Woods is beach or subway or just plain armchair reading par excellence. And the cover is rad.

LINK | 1:42 AM | TB

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