Galley Talk

Irma Wolfson, buyer, Reading Room, Las Vegas

by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 4/23/2007

Do not start Tana French's In the Woods (Viking, May) before going to bed if you want a good night's sleep. French may be a first-time author, but she has crafted a completely engrossing literary police procedural that kept me up much too late. I was captivated by the way she created characters who are complicated, flawed, smart and funny. The deeply attractive and engaging narrator, Rob Ryan, is a murder squad detective in Dublin. A victim of a terrible trauma as a child, he has told no one about his past, not even Cassie, his partner, who has her own issues. Of course, the buried past rises to the surface to confound Ryan's investigation of a missing child. This book has the same flavor of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender series. The combination of a richly presented social setting and intelligent and quirky characters, along with the slow but fascinating pace of a murder investigation, gave me real reading pleasure. This is quite an accomplished debut.