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In the summer of 1985, 12-year-old Adam and his two best friends enter the woods around their housing estate, but only Adam makes it out of those woods alive, and with no recollection of what happened to his friends. Twenty-two years later, the murdered body of 12-year-old Katy Devlin is found atop an altar stone on an archaeological dig site in the same woods surrounding the same housing estate. Adam, who now goes by Rob and has become a detective on Dublin’s police force Murder Squad, is assigned the case. With Rob’s memories still suppressed, he and his fellow detectives go to great lengths to solve the girl’s murder and the mystery of his friends’ disappearance.
I would give this 2 or 3 stars out of 5 for the author’s delivery of the story. The storyline itself was brilliant. But I couldn’t stand the main character, especially by the end, and the author does a terrible job following through on major parts of the plot (the ending was NOT okay). Also, for me, the story was just slow. It picked up about two-thirds of the way through but then slowed down again, dragging a bit to the end. The suspense didn’t really ever build to the point where I wanted to sacrifice sleep to read, which is what I look for in a good thriller. That being said, I will still probably give the second book in this series a shot (The Likeness).
Rated: DIRT for language aplenty (lots of the f-word and other American and European swearing) and some very adult content (details of the murder of a child, harm to minors, the account of a rape, other violence). There are no sex scenes, but some sexual/crude references.
