Campaign for the American Reader: Five novels with criminal acts at their heart

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Five novels with criminal acts at their heart

Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. She is the author of two #1 New York Times bestselling novels, Into The Water

and The Girl on The Train. An international #1 bestseller, The Girl on the Train has sold 23 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a major motion picture. Into the Water was also a Sunday Times and New York Times #1 bestseller, selling 4 million copies worldwide. Her newest thriller is A Slow Fire Burning. Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and now splits her time between London and Edinburgh.

At CrimeReads she tagged five novels with criminal acts at their core, including:

In the Woods by Tana French (2007)

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t read In the Woods—and you really ought to—don’t read this section.

In Tana French’s debut, two detectives, both troubled by historical trauma, are faced with two parallel cases, one in the present and one in the past. So far, so conventional. Oh, but In the Woods is so very far from conventional.

Between detectives Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan, French creates a relationship which lifts the heart, a partnership we are almost immediately invested in, one that we can see enduring for years and cases and novels to come. But life’s not like that, and so French breaks their hearts and ours, savagely and with calculated cruelty, and she’s not done yet. Not even close.

The principal mystery, centered on the murder of a teenage girl, unspools cleverly and carefully; the identity of the killer, when it is revealed, comes as a shock, and yet—as is the case in all the best crime novels—it is possible to figure it out if you are paying close attention.

But it is in French’s treatment of the second mystery, involving the disappearance of two of Rob’s childhood friends two decades before the contemporary storyline begins, that the novel is elevated, because French does not solve it. She refuses to give us an answer, because Rob—who was there when whatever happened to his friends happened – cannot remember. And will never remember. For reasons that we can only guess at, his memory of what happened is gone – or perhaps it never formed, or perhaps it was buried too deep, or perhaps he will not allow it to resurface...

I am aware that this is a matter of personal taste. Irene, who confesses later in the book that she enjoys a ‘traditional crime novel, with good prevailing, evil vanquished’, might, like a friend of mine, have thrown the book across the room when she realized what French had done. But I found the unresolvedness of In the Woods thrilling, I was in awe of its boldness and its realism. Because not everyone finds redemption, not everyone gets a happy ending. Some things are unknowable, some answers are never going to be found. And sometimes the bad guy gets away with it.