After the first chapters of a mystery novel, I usually sail through the rest

averaging over 200 pages a day. Toward the climax, I'd even speed up more.

The crime is always gruesome but the story often ends in a sweet and upbeat note.

The 429-page "In the Woods," however, took me five days, and the ending left a

bitter taste.

Like many native English speakers, the author wielded idiomatic proses with

apparent ease. The first two chapters overwhelmed me with new words. The scene

was in Dublin, Ireland, and that might explain to some degree the more alien

diction (bedsit, semi-d, bolshie, whiskeyed coffee, etc., for a few

samples). I progressed at a snail pace and at times found it so frustrating

that I began to look for errors. I did find on page 102, she wrote

    Jamie leaning over our shoulders and yelping excited instructions.

Last I checked, instructions rarely get excited, if at all. In the end,

however, I was happy for the exposure to a spate of unfamiliar words and

expressions, for example, "put one foot down."

And it was a delight to read a recently acquired idiom. On page 358,

    I had never imagined this kind of betrayal. Hell hath no fury.

In the previous novel, "The Black Book," one was called a "scorned woman."

Both were from "Heaven hath no rage like love to hate turned; nor hell a

fury like a woman scorned."

Many passages were memorable. For example, when the narrator, Detective Ryan

returned to his childhood playground,

    Knocknaree wood was the real thing, and it was more intricate and more

    secretive than I had remembered. It had its own order, its own fierce

    battles and alliances. I was an intruder here, now, and I had a deep

    prickling sense that my presence had instantly been marked and that the

    wood was watching me, with an equivocal collective gaze, not yet accepting

    or rejecting; reserving judgment.

It's more than a mystery. Lots of ink were spent on background events and

experiences. The past refused to go away and kept mixing up with the present.

Sometimes it felt tedious.

The murder case of a 12-year-old girl was resolved but the ending was tragic.

Detective Ryan, deeply traumatized by his childhood experience of two missing

friends in the woods, couldn't handle a serious relationship or was "f*cked

up," made mistakes due to his own vanity and gullability, lost the trust of

his partners, and was kicked out of the elite Murder Squad, despite all the

suffering he went through and the brilliant ideas he hit to nab the killer.