In the Woods

This is my job, and you don’t go into it—or, if you do, you don’t last— without some natural affinity for its priorities and demands. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

This is another of my illness-audio comfort listens. I have to say though that it wasn't quite comfortable or rather that it was comfortable in the same way you might feel looking at old snapshots of your 10-years departed German Shepard over a cup of tea.

Set in a Dublin suburban housing development, Knocknaree, undergoing an archaeological survey before it is to be plowed under for a new freeway. One day the body of a young girl is discovered and the rest of story is the process by which the detectives solve the case. Besides describing the actual police procedure the story also encompasses the dissolution of a platonic yet deep friendship between detectives Robert Adams (the protagonist narrator) and Cassie Maddox. There are complications to the case, one of which is that Robert Ryan is, coincidentally, the survivor of a previous child disappearance also in Knocknaree from 20-years earlier in 1984. Another complication involves the politics and corruption around around government developments and land values.

This book is beautifully written taking you on a journey that will end the arrest of the killer but along the way, has much to say and describe about young free-range children with their own child logic, the sad unravelling of a unique platonic relationship, the spavined yet coldly logical workings of psychopathic mind and of course, the day-to-day workings of a squad of dedicated police up against a complicated murder investigation.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be. . . . Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.