Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who - or what - could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness?" "Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery. Where has she been? Why has she waited so long to come forward? Could her abductor truly be a beloved Baltimore cop? There isn't a shred of evidence to support her story, and every lead she gives the police seems to be another dead end - a dying, incoherent man, a razed house, a missing grave, and a family that disintegrated long ago, torn apart not only by the crime but by the fissures the tragedy revealed in what appeared to be the perfect household." "In a story that moves back and forth across the decades, there is only one person who dares to be skeptical of a woman who wants to claim the identity of one Bethany sister without revealing the fate of the other. Will he be able to discover the truth?"--BOOK JACKET.

Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, land the first big murder case of their police careers: a 12-year-old girl has been murdered in the woods adjacent to a Dublin suburb. Twenty years before, two children disappeared in the same woods, and Ryan was found clinging to a tree trunk, his sneakers filled with blood, unable to tell police anything about what happened to his friends. Ryan, although scarred by his experience, employs all his skills in the search for the killer and in hopes that the investigation will also reveal what happened to his childhood friends. In the Woods is a novel about cops, murder, memory, relationships, and modern Ireland. The characters of Ryan and Maddox are nicely developed and author French builds the psychological pressure on Ryan as the investigation goes forward under the glare of the tabloid media.

This novel was compelling to read until the last quarter or so of the book when it became stilted and predictable. The outcome was forced and too contrived, tying up the ends too neatly except for the main mystery of all (and that just trailed away into nothing).

Good beginning and middle but with an unsatisfying ending.

A wonderful mystery and psychological thriller. Filled with a lovable pair of detectives with an amazing friendship. Great for any mystery lover...French's detail and function of memory is a joy to read.

Great read from Tana French...deep characters...wish the end wrapped up Detective Ryan's childhood ordeal a little better.

The loss of a child is a shocking, life-altering event, especially when she disappears from beneath your very gaze. One moment seven-year-old Celia is balancing atop a stone wall--taking in the sunshine and breathing the fragrant air--and in the blink of an eye she has vanished from Christopher's sight. Christopher is in the midst of showing their historic home to some tourists while Janet is off at orchestra practice. He thinks Celia is probably playing somewhere in the yard as he passes the window facing the stone wall, and he continues to give the grand tour of the recent restorations to their vintage home. Close to a decade of searching does not return Celia, and Christopher and Janet are left with the fragments of a life they cannot piece together. Perhaps Celia is not dead and she resides in another dimension that defies time and spatial probability as we know it, or maybe Christopher is mad with inconsolable grief.

I read this review after reading the book and found it to be very much in line with my thoughts on the book. The writing was VERY readable, but the last part of the book was a loss.

Kirkus Reviews: A college girl's romance with an older artist turns into a serious relationship and then a mystery—after he disappears without a trace.
Impressionable young Jolene Iolas is 19 and attending Bard College. While her friend and roommate Molly is sleeping her way through most of the school's male population, Jolene has more serious things on her mind (though indeed she's no wallflower). She strikes up a correspondence with the artist Martin Sloane, whose work has enraptured her, and arranges for him to come to campus and exhibit his work. Martin's art consists of gnomic little boxes packed full of odd objects suggesting sadness, memory, and loss (descriptions of these Joseph Cornell–esque boxes precede each chapter). Jolene and Martin begin spending weekends together, and pretty soon it's years later, Jolene is teaching at Indiana University, and Martin is commuting from Toronto as often as he can. A visit from Molly scrapes a few raw nerves in the fragile relationship, and Jolene wakes up afterward to find Martin gone. Many years later, Jolene reconnects with Molly—whom she had a confusing fight with after Martin's disappearance—when the two meet up in Dublin, Martin's birthplace, sniffing out the scent of the elusive box-maker and making halfhearted stabs at fixing their broken friendship. Jolene narrates the bulk of the story, though intermittent chapters come from Martin. The whole, albeit impressively written, ultimately doesn't sustain itself, and when, a third of the way in, Martin disappears, the novel has a difficult time recovering. The events driving Martin to leave, murky as they are, seem wrenchingly contrived, and the mystery that follows isn't especially engrossing.
From a promising young Canadian writer, a failed effort that says everything quite well but may not interest many.

I am so surprised at some of the "not so great" reviews of this book! I absolutley loved it! (oh well, to each his own, right?) I was completley entranced with this story from page one. I think the fact that I read this book during the busy holiday season and finished it in two days says plently! I was sneaking in chapters while wrapping presents and leaning against the oven with my nose in the book while baking cookies.(while usually my nose is pressed against the glass window of the oven!) This book just sucked me in. I can't wait to pass it on to a friend or two.

I read one reviewer of this book said that they could not find a character to root for in the book. Well, I was routing for Katie, the young girl who goes missing! I found the other characters very engrossing, especially Mr. Dees, the lonely math tutor. I thought the book was extremley well written and very engrossing. I would recommend this book to anyone!

In his new novel's opening chapters, Martin creates an idyllic vision of a small Indiana town in the 1970s before exposing its sinister undercurrents. Katie Mackey is the nine-year-old daughter of the man who owns the glass factory, the town's main employer. One summer evening, she rides her bike to the public library to return some books and never returns. Suspects include Mr. Dees, the lonely and eccentric high school teacher who was tutoring Katie in math, and a construction worker named Raymond, who has befriended Dees and might in fact be blackmailing him. Even Katie's father and teenage brother are not who they seem. Very well written and kept my interest.