"In the Woods" by Tana French, my final thoughts

I finally finished it! And it was amazing! I am rating this book 5/5 on goodreads.com because I absolutely loved the plot and the characters and the POV, just everything about this book. This was a great novel and I can't wait to read more of her books eventually. But I'll start by giving a small overview and then more details about the things I liked.

I really enjoyed this book. It starts out with a flashback kind of thing about the main character, Ryan, and what happened to him and his friends when he was young, and this event kind of plays through the rest of the story. Ryan is in his late 20's who is a murder detective and one day he and his partner, Cassie, investigate a murder of a 12 year old girl that happened in the same neighborhood that the event of Ryan's childhood took place. Very eery and creepy, but I enjoyed it. It was interesting. I won't give too much more about the plot because I don't want to give anything away, but I will admit it was difficult for me to put this book down.

The characters were great. Very unique and believable, even the characters that weren't as prevalent were unique and felt real even though they were only there for a brief few moments. But the two main characters, Cassie and Ryan were great, and the story is told through Ryan's perspective. But what really got me, was that every now and then, Ryan starts addressing the reader. He goes into the 2nd person and says 'you' to the reader. It threw me off a little at first, but it was done wonderfully. Not many authors do this, but I felt that French did a wonderful job with incorporating the 2nd person. It was subtle but interesting at the same time, bringing the reader closer to the story than they already were. I think this is why I enjoyed this book so much. Otherwise I might have given it a 4.5, but this extra POV gave it the last jump to a full 5/5.

I would recommend this book to anyone who really enjoys detective stories, or thrillers, or psychological thrillers. It was great and keeps you on your toes. Or at least it did for me :)

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The next book that I will be reading is Breaking Creed by Alex Kava. I won this novel in a goodreads.com giveaway.