Summary: Coolbar, Ireland, is a village of secrets and Shell, caretaker to her younger brother and sister after the death of their mother and with the absence of their father, is not about to reveal hers until suspicion falls on the wrong person.

Everything's been wrong since 15-year-old Shell's Mam died. Her father forces his kids to say the rosary and then gets drunk. They live from money he skims off donations he collects for the church. Shell is left to take care of her younger brother and sister in their Irish village; her only joy comes in stolen moments with a local lad.

The novel could have gone several ways, but perhaps because it is based on a true story, its path is unexpected. A dead baby is found, and the authorities, thinking it is Shell's, accuse her of murder. Moreover, the authorities suspect her own dad is the baby's father. Or perhaps the baby's father is the new priest.

A lovely book with a believable ending.

After several years of wandering around Europe, Australian-born Scully, his wife, Jennifer, and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, decide to settle down in a ramshackle old house in rural Ireland. Jennifer and Billie return to Australia to settle their affairs, while Scully stays behind to make the house habitable. Several months later, Scully is to meet them at Shannon Airport, but only Billie emerges from the plane. Scully sets off on an obsessive chase through their old haunts in Europe in a desperate search for Jennifer, dragging his daughter with him. What follows is very strange: it's a ghost story, but the ghosts make only two brief appearances; it's a love story in which we never meet one of the lovers; it's a picuresque journey where the sights are never described.

For the first 50 pages I was sure this would become one of my favorite books of the year. I was captivated by Winton's brilliant prose and his intriguing premise: Scully's wife Jennifer flies from Australia to join him in Ireland but doesn't get off the plane. Their daughter Billie does, but won't tell what happened to her mother. I felt nicely set up for a fine tale of suspense, as Scully sets off to find Jennifer. There was some suspense but when I finished the book I was frustrated and enraged. Furthermore, why couldn't we learn what happened to Jennifer? The only clue is Billie's impression on the plane that her mother's face was turning to marble. Not very helpful. One must conclude that Winton doesn't want us to understand, he wants us to accept the mystery without the resolution. That seems to be the message of the horsemen who gathered near the ruined Irish castle, twice -- their symbolism escapes me completely.

I was also disappointed with the acts of child abuse throughout the story. A mother abandons her daughter who now cannot speak of it, a the father drags her all over Europe with very little money, meager food and living conditions, while she keeps begging to leave and go home. She is bitten horribly by a dog but Scully doesn't have enough time to have her treated properly when it becomes infected; he spends most of this time drunk, runs from suspicion of murder, and ends up in jail on Christmas Day. I loved him at the beginning of the book when he was preparing a home for his family in Ireland, but hated him by the time the book was done.

The beginning of the book gets a 5 -- the rest of the book is a 1. . .

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.

This book took me about a month to get past page 8, then I flew through the rest of the book, only to halt again 20 pages or so from the end. Not sure what was up with the start and finish, but other than that, this book has the classic qualities of good Irish storytelling that mark Binchy's works.

I got a bit sucked into this mystery right away, maybe due to the accent of the reader for the audio version. The male lead, Quirk, is classic in the sense that he's an outsider, drunk, low in society y et a better man than the patriarchs of society. He's investigating the murder of a young girl who comes through his morgue.
The story seemed to falter towards the end. The rape of the daughter didn't really seem to serve much purpose other than to show how evil Andy is, which we already know since he killed Christine's child, and abuses his wife. Not that all relationships need to be resolved, but the ending between Quirk and his family in America seemed awkward, as if Black just didn't know what to do with them.
I've heard this is set up to be a series- I'm not sure if I'd read another.

The relationship between the mother and daughter in this story is heartbreaking. Misunderstandings, prejudice and bad communication plague them even though they love each other.
This seemed to me to be the most important and interesting theme in the story, and I didn't really understand the point of all of the other material, especially all of the details of the mother's first love. The daughter's diary is also completely incomprehensible to me.
I feel like the only part that really gripped me was how distant her daughter is and what an asshole her son is.
In a way, I don't have a ton of sympathy for these tragic, long-term miscommunication. If you don't talk, you bring it on yourself.

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.