Category: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN-13:9780143113492
Pub. Date: May 2008 (reprint)
Date Read: June 2008
"There's still a chance they could be alive, isn't there?... "I suppose there is," I said. Peter and Jaime, out there somewhere, specks of faces blurring into some vast moving throng. When I was twelve this was in some ways the worst possibility of all: that they had simply kept running that day, left me behind and never once looked back. I still have a reflexive habit of scanning for them in crowds - airports, gigs, train stations; it's faded a lot now, but when I was younger it would build to something like panic and I would end up whipping my head back and forth like a cartoon character, terrified that the one face I missed might be one of them. "I doubt it, though. There was a lot of blood."
Detective Rob Ryan has spent the past 20 years living with the ghosts of his friends who disappared in the woods of his small Dublin neighborhood. He was with them at the time but the shock of whatever happened out there has been lost in the recess of his memory. And, so his past is a secret he's kept hidden from his co-workers and friends but when a new murder investigation begins it is his past that may offer a solution.
Detective Ryan and his partner and best friend Cassie Maddox are the wonder team of the Dublin Murder Squad. Some assume there's more than just a deep friendship but Rob and Cassie don't pay attention to that. What they want is to head up the investigation of Katie Devlin's murder. The twelve-year old girl was found in the same woods where Rob's friends disappeared from so many years ago.
It's probably not right that Rob be on the case, he really should tell his superiors, but he feels like he's on the verge of not only solving Katy's murder but also the disapparence of his friends. Rob involves Cassie in keeping his identity a secret and together they stumble through the facts to find out what happened.
Sibling rivalry, a family history of abuse and even political undertones all serve to keep the reader guessing for the true motives of the murder. Cassie and Rob are an interesting pair and definitely not the standard detective and partner cutouts found in a lot of mystery novels. It is hard to pin this book as a mystery too because it's so much more than about the mystery, it's also about the after effects of the crime.
Rich in atmosphere and descriptions, this is a book to be read at leisure to the very last page. I bet you, you won't believe what happens at the end.