In the Woods with Literary Mysteries

 I’ve been trying to figure out how to handle a post about my discontent with contemporary literary mysteries, and sort of wondered if I should hold off writing about Tana French until I post that. That draft, which has gone through several iterations, always has the same claim:  Tana French is one of the reasons I keep flinging myself against the literary mystery genre despite disliking what I find more often than not! Though I keep up with her work, she is an author I’ve been reading almost from the start, and I got to wondering if I would like the Dublin Murder Squad, and particularly its first and most controversial book, 2007’s In the Woods, as much now that my taste has turned away from literary fiction. And, well, I did! In fact I liked it even more than I did when I read this around 2009. 

Spoilers for In the Woods Ahead! 

It’s almost 20 years old and it’s good. Either go read it, or read the post and damn the spoilers… The thesis of my little essay is that the book was no less enjoyable if you know what happens. 

In the Woods is described as a hybrid police procedural and psychological thriller, and I would consider these the hybrid subgenres within the umbrella genre of literary mysteries. It is about a detective, Rob Ryan, who is haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his two best friends in childhood. He was with them on the day they were abducted or murdered, but suffers amnesia. This unsolved case seemingly intertwines with another case of a murdered child set on the same estate which Rob,
now a detective, investigates with his partner Cassie. Will the modern case unlock the old one? To the shock and rage of many readers, the answer is no! French only solves one of the cases! The seeming connection between the two cases is a red herring, and Rob ends the book without answers or closure about what happened to his two best friends (and himself) as a child!  

I’m very familiar with the controversy that surrounds In the Woods because I was working in bookshops soon after it came out, and often recommended it to customers. I have listened to so many grievances about this book. If it came out today, I wonder if In the Woods would even register as having a controversial ending. Since its publication, there have been nearly twenty years of the literary mystery subgenre growing and proliferating across NPR’s best of the year lists. Some of those books don’t even solve one case! I remember the ending bugging me too, and I tried to pitch it to people with the explicit warning that it did break the rules of the mystery genre and end ambiguously on one of its two mysteries. I liked this book well enough to become a lifelong Tana French fan, but I disliked it enough that I never went back to reread the Dublin Murder Squad semi-series from the top. My opinion before this reread was:  it’s an okay book, the worst of the series, with a heavy handed and very obvious contemporary mystery and an unsatisfying literary flourish of ambiguity with the cold case. I remembered it as a rather poor police procedural but a promising start to a fine career in literary mystery. 

My opinion after re-reading? In the Woods is in fact a damn good police procedural and it is a great example of literary mystery done right. It’s both better than I remembered and much more enjoyable to reread than it was to read the first time around. It is a shockingly good first novel: polished, engaging, and self assured. It won a bunch of first novel awards in 2008, and it deserved them; I’d feel comfortable arguing that it’s one of the best first mystery novels of the 21st century so far. 

I do think French’s influence may have led to a lot of tropes and trends in literary mystery that I hate. If everything in In the Woods weren’t so well executed, I would probably dislike the book! But even from the start, Tana French was an undeniable talent:  her ability to balance character with theme with plot only got better, but it was there from the start. Like most literary mysteries, In the Woods has something that it is really about bubbling beneath the surface mystery. Unlike most literary mysteries, In the Woods  is good. It doesn’t have a singular and very boring thematic intent (often my feelings about literary mystery is that they’re just too thematically simple).  In the Woods is thematically rich. Beneath its two surface mysteries, it’s about the stasis that childhood trauma casts on some lives; it’s about magical thinking; it is about the fragility of friendship; it is about how some people are incapable of growth or change or escape, so broken that they will try to destroy anything and anyone who does want to be fully human. 

The two cases aren’t both a perfect fit for all of these themes. On one hand, the ultimate disconnection between the two cases was something that really bugged me after I first read it; I and my irate customers yearned to have at least a tidy parallel if not an outright solution to both. On the other hand, I wonder if the themes would be too heavy handed if the two cases had more parallels? Some ideas are too complicated to break down into two tidy parallel plots, and I think the long shadow of childhood trauma certainly qualifies as a complicated topic if it is done well. That said, those who have read the book might have read my list of themes and thought I was talking about the perpetrator of the contemporary case, teenaged psychopath Rosalind Devlin, who manipulates a boyfriend into killing her little sister rather than let her move away to pursue her dreams and talents (and potentially overshadow Rosalind). But as much as Rosalind is the criminal, Rob is the villain of his narrative, and those themes most accurately describe him. The real story of the book is not Rosalind’s monstrous violence. It’s not the crime in the past or the emptiness in Rob’s memory, but the way these have stunted him and made him intolerant of adult love, human change, growth. And yes, I suppose, the way his trauma makes him monstrous in a way that is a bit like Rosalind’s inborn monstrosity. 

When I praise the characters, I do mean mostly Rob. The characters are all filtered through what readers are quickly meant to understand is an unreliable narrator. Now I happen to like Cassie and think she’s fascinating, especially in how she occasionally breaks through Rob’s controlling narrative and all the things he doesn’t want to admit. But it’s a first person book, and ultimately Rob is the character who matters the most. He’s not very likable, which in fact I like a great deal about him: it's hard to do unlikable well. He’s interesting and mostly very believable to me as an adult living with the wounds of shattering trauma. I think it is fascinating how well French paralleled the tight bonds of childhood friends, the way their identities bleed into one another and they function as a singular unit, with Cassie and Rob’s relationship as partners–or, at least, within Rob’s experience of Cassie and Rob’s relationship! By the end of the book, it’s clear that Cassie wanted the juvenile friendship to grow into something adult:  not necessarily romantic or sexual (though it’s clear she’d be open to that), but she is ready for and capable of growth. Rob doesn’t just not want their relationship to change, he is absolutely incapable of it. Stunted by the loss of his friends and his memory, his greatest desire is to be part of a unit in the way that only childhood friends can be, and he lashes out at Cassie for her willingness to let the nature of their closeness change. Throughout the book, Cassie observes that children think differently from adults, and it was only on reread that I appreciated how much of Rob’s unreliable narration is a demonstration of his childish magical thinking. I also picked up that Rob's susceptibility to Rosalind's manipulation is related to his own trauma-stunted personality. It’s delicious how carefully constructed his unreliable narration is, and that is the sort of thing that is only really visible on reread. 

As strong as Rob and Cassie are, my longstanding inner criticism of the book was that the culprit of the modern murder, Rosalind, was cartoonish and silly. And, well, this is one critique that I’m not going to overturn. Rosalind is not French’s best, but to be fair I almost never like a fictional psychopath, especially a youthful one. Most of the rest of the Devlin family (except the mother, barely a character) are interesting and well drawn, especially the victim herself and her father, both of whom have stellar and heartbreaking scenes. Character and voice are French’s strength and always have been. 

Finally, plot. I have claimed, and I do believe that both plots are well balanced with both themes and character, unusually so for a literary mystery. This may be my bias speaking, but I think plot tends to be one of the first things to fail in literary mysteries. In the Woods is too long, as most literary mysteries are... But I’m not sure what I would cut to make it shorter. I suppose the whole character of Sam and the subplot of his investigation into real estate investments as the cause of the murder could be excised entirely, making a more focused book, but Sam feels like such an integral part of Rob’s delusional projection of his two lost childhood friends onto his adult colleagues that if I were editor, I couldn’t cut him. The killer and solution to the contemporary mystery are fine, actually, because the procedure of the police procedural in this book feels good. Oh, of course it’s fictionalized, but everything makes sense and I do think enough clues are given to a reader who cares about fair play. The sense of something rotten in the Devlin home is a classic hook, and I think French does a good job with misdirection towards both parents, especially when questions arise about whether or not Jonathan Devlin, who was a teenager when Rob was a child in the same estate, could be connected to the disappearance of his friends. 

Perhaps instead of plot I should talk about pacing. It’s here that the secondary mystery, Rob’s childhood crime, is crucial:  it, along with the disintegration of Rob’s sanity, creates tension and interest even when the main case is stagnating. Did I mention that Rob is keeping his identity a secret to most colleagues except Cassie? That is one part of the book that super doesn’t hold up:  it would never happen. But it works as a source of tension in the narrative:  will Rob be discovered and taken off the case or fired? Can he keep his head together or will it lead him astray on solving the new case?  Having the old mystery allows the new one to flounder and stagnate in ways that I think are probably a little more realistic than the propulsive plotting common to police procedurals on TV. It also lets the A plot of the modern mystery be a little simpler than (if I’m remembering right) later mysteries in the Dublin Murder Squad series. The pacing does fall off a cliff at the end of the book in that French didn’t seem to know how to end it at all. It goes through multiple false endings, many potential last lines, before finally just petering out. That’s okay with me, first book stuff. It’s very hard to write a novel I’m told. 

Rob’s fights with his own memory and the effect they have on his relationships and ability to do his job are sad and tense, and all the sadder because they lead him nowhere. I was basically a child when I first read this book, and now that I’m old and familiar with different genre conventions, the irresolution of Rob’s personal mystery doesn’t bother me. Ambiguity and psychological wretchedness are very noir, as is Rob’s status as the villain of his own life’s narrative. I think French’s choice to ultimately leave the earlier case unsolved is actually a brilliant character decision:  on this read, by the end of the book I was convinced that the solution to that case really did lie in Rob’s head and only Rob’s head. It flits around the edges of his narration (and I do have a theory or two about what happened), but Rob is too cowardly to face it, too fragile and too rigid. Rob’s pernicious stasis ultimately destroys his partnership and friendship with Cassie, but it is also responsible for the lack of resolution to the earlier case. It is not ever explicitly stated in the text, but I think it is quite subtextually clear that if Rob could let himself grow up and allow his relationship with Cassie to evolve, she could support him through the horror of unlocking his mind to discover the truth. The old crime remaining unsolved not a bait and switch because Rob’s inability to face his past and the brokenness that stops him from growing are integral parts of his character. That’s his story, and it is sad, but it’s not unrealistic or unsatisfying. We might not get the literal solution, but by the end of the book on my reread, I understood why the old case would never be solved, and I was satisfied with that understanding.

I dearly wish Tana French would return to the Dublin Murders books. It’s been ten years! I do love the Cal Hooper books, and I get the sense that she’s interested in exploring justice more than policework these days, but I love the way this series is structured:  by moving from one protagonist to another, selecting a supporting character from one book to take over the next. Book two in this semi-series is Cassie’s book, and I seem to remember that it has almost no mention of the events of book one or of Rob. I recall not liking it quite as much, finding the central conceit more difficult to get on board with. I plan to reread it very soon while In the Woods is still fresh so I can compare. 

Capsule Thoughts: February 2026

I didn’t read as much in February as I usually do, and I wasn’t able to finish any of the posts I was working on. This is because my energy got redirected into a sudden professional opportunity. I’m not sure if that opportunity over, but I hope to at least read more in the coming month! 

Cop-Hater (1956), Ed McBain
I initially had written a separate post about this book complaining in detail about its virulent misogyny. But I’m not sure it’s putting on my blog:  it’s not like I need to explain or justify to myself that this is something I don’t like in books I read for entertainment. Suffice to say I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of page time devoted to objectifying women’s bodies when I picked up this book after reading many glowing recommendations of the 87th Precinct series. It was seriously distracting and made me uncomfortable, especially in audio format. Almost every single point of view detective is introduced with a chapter at home as he beholds his sex object, and these women run a gamut of misogynist tropes that is frankly disturbing:  a literal deaf-mute, submissive sex kitten; a withholding minx; a sleeping Madonna. Maybe I’m just not very familiar with pulps, but after reading so many contemporaneous books written by women, this was a disaster. Anything enjoyable was overshadowed. I’d like to read more McBain because the recommendations I’ve received are so earnest and glowing, but I’m not sure I can keep going chronologically. Maybe I’ll skip a few years or even a decade??? 

Cinder House (2025), Freya Marske
Not a mystery and not a novel, this novella is a retelling of Cinderella with a fun premise:  what if Cinderella were a ghost, murdered by her step family? This murder is explicit, but there is another that haunts the edges of the book that wasn’t ever explicitly excavated. So it was a little mystery adjacent in that sense. Marske writes romantasy, I guess, and this little novella was very focused on the relationships which is a little of a disappointment because it actually has rather interesting fantasy worldbuilding. I enjoyed it, but with most novellas if I enjoy them, wished it were longer. 

The Hollow (1946), Agatha Christie
What a book, what a book! I’m working on a stand alone post dedicated to it but I feel like all my thoughts were blown away by high altitude of all my work travel. I hope it doesn’t go the way of Five Little Pigs and turn into a draft that I feel like I can’t finish without a reread! Not that rereading this would be bad:  I think it is the sort of Christie that could, actually, stand for a fairly immediate revisiting, it is that complex with characters. 

I have a few books halfway finished that I’m trying to get back to after my pause. I even wondered if I was experiencing a reading slump, something that can happen to me after I read a truly excellent book like The Hollow. Maybe I was, but then my free time evaporated. Hopefully a forced break will reinvigorate me with the books and series I was reading. 

Capsule Reactions: January 2025

Sometimes there just isn’t much to write about a book, but I have a few thoughts I’d like to get out of the noggin.

The Silk Stocking Murders (1928), Anthony Berkeley
I said I was probably going to revisit the works of Anthony Berkeley Cox in 2026, and I did. And, uh, well. It wasn’t an improvement on The Wychford Mystery. The Silk Stocking Murders is one of the most odiously antisemitic mysteries that I’ve ever read from the Golden Age of Detection (GAD), which is really saying something because many books of this era are antisemitic. It is also pervasively sexist. Because I am interested in the development of the serial killer thriller subgenre, I toyed around with whether I wanted to write a full post about it… but in order to get there, I’d need to either write through or set aside the absolutely rancid bigotry of the book. It’s too prominent to pass by quickly, and what is there to even say that hasn’t already been said? Many old books have various bigotries, but they’ll usually have other things of value. This is not one of those books. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and the highest value it has is serving as an example of a historical work that does not manage to transcend the bigotries of its time or its author. Despite having two terrible experiences reading Cox’s work, I will still probably read his more famous books eventually. But at this point, those will be out of historical curiosity about the genre and not for pleasure. 

The Tainted Cup (2024), Robert Jackson Bennett
This book was enjoyable! But, despite being sold to me as a fantasy/mystery genre mashup, the mystery side of things was pretty slim. I would categorize it more as a political thriller than a mystery, and the fantasy side definitely comes first:  it’s set in a world like Pacific Rim, beset by kaiju, with a creepy and cool biohacking sort of magic. It doesn’t really fit here because it would be difficult to write about coherently without explaining all the lore and magic etc. But I am giving it a shout out for having fun with some mystery tropes. One thing that is borrowed from the mystery genre is the Sherlock/Watson dynamic between the detective and the sidekick. This trope is always, always fun when it is done well, and I enjoyed it here. The narrator, the Watson character, is biomagically altered to have perfect recall, but that doesn’t give him understanding. It’s a fun way to justify first person narration where clues are noticed and recorded for the reader, but not understood. I liked the book a lot and already bought the sequel. 

Last Call at the Nightingale (2022), Katharine Schellman
This isn’t the first contemporary mystery novel set in the 1920s that I’ve read, and I’m sure that it won’t be the last. It’s a historical setting that I try again and again, searching for something that will really capture me, yet nothing really has. This one was enjoyable enough and I don’t have a lot to say about it. However, it did give me an epiphany:  the reason I keep choosing contemporary mysteries in the ‘20s is because of my love for the Golden Age of Detection. It’s so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t realize it consciously! It also explains why I tend to be vague dissatisfied with these books:  they aren’t anything like GADs, they’re not intended to be. I wonder if I’ll enjoy them more if I adjust my expectations? Or maybe I should admit that, while I like historical mysteries, this era may be too overshadowed by the Golden Age to satisfy me? 

The Darkness (2015?, 2018 english), Ragnar Jonasson 
This was the first in a series of recent Icelandic crime novels. I'm not the biggest fan of Nordic Noir but I do partake every once in a while. This book has both the strengths and weaknesses of the Nordic Noir. It was a strange and dark book, very atmospheric, and I have no idea how it’s going to be a series. The main character, Hulda, is a detective on the eve of retirement, and though she’s stated repeatedly to have been a very good detective, it isn’t shown throughout the book. She makes a series of devastating mistakes that were frustrating to read, but she is an interesting character: I like a difficult middle aged woman detective. The audiobook was good: briskly narrated, and I liked the concise style. I’m not sure about the ending, but I will probably read at least book two out of sheer curiosity.

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

I’ve alluded enough times to my soft policy of what I do and don’t write about here that I feel it’s worth writing up in a post of its own to link to. 

I don’t write about every book that I read. This is for a couple of reasons: 

1. This isn’t a review blog! I am not chronicling the entirety of my reading life. I don’t have time for that, but mostly, I don’t want to put the pressure on myself to feel like I have to come up with public-facing thoughts about everything.

2. I don’t like everything I read, and I don’t want to build a habit of saying negative things about living authors in public. 

The first reason is fairly self explanatory, but what about the second? I have access to my stats, I know that absolutely nobody is reading this website. I have no audience and maybe never will! It’s not something I expect (who even reads blogs in 2026!?) and I’m not trying to market myself or publicize this space. I have even questioned myself severely about why I chose to write a public blog instead of continuing to keep a private journal and the answer is convenience as much as anything:  notebooks are heavy and get full up and it can be hard to find a thought again for reference. I want to be able to search and index my thoughts. A private google doc or private blog could work, but I want to be able to pull up my thoughts to reference on any device, anywhere, without having to sign in. For this purpose, a blog just makes sense.

So, these are public thoughts, and I do feel a responsibility to be professional and reasonably kind about the hard work of living people. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” isn’t a rule I necessarily live my life by, but also, why not err in that direction? I’m anonymous, but I am a professional in a book-adjacent field and as a professional, I simply wouldn’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say at a conference or event.

Sometimes I’ll start writing a post and come back to my draft and feel like my words are mean. One lesson I’ve learned about the internet is that it is a small place and for all that it’s full of bots, it also has real people. Almost no living author is so big or so inhuman that they may not be googling for reviews and reactions to their work. I don’t want to be in a position of making anyone feel bad for trying to make art and entertainment. The stakes are low for me, but emotionally high for others. So what if I hated a book and didn’t finish it? Who cares? Beyond absolute record keeping (which I can do more privately), I’m not even sure I do. If a theme or trend in contemporary publishing really bothers me, I think I should be able to write about them without relying on specific examples.

This doesn’t mean I won’t ever voice a critique about a book, but if I am writing publicly about a book by a living author, it means that even if I have critiques, I overall liked it! No holds barred for the dead, though, nor for works that are objectionable to me in ways that go beyond taste and preference.  

Suspects as Narrators and Detectives: Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope

Immediately after I complained about the group of suspects standing in for the detective, I read the first three Vera Stanhope books by Ann Cleeves and found the same thing, particularly in the first two:  suspects, or civilians within the circle of suspects or potential victims, conducting their own speculations and investigations. Interestingly, it doesn’t bother me as much when Cleeves does it! 

Before I get into my thoughts, some quick background:  I’ve read and really enjoyed Cleeves’ Shetland and Two Rivers books (in fact, Shetland has been on my reread list because I remember liking them), but hadn’t touched Vera. No particular reason except maybe they were a little more difficult to find, or maybe I have been low key saving them for a rainy day. I’ve been on a Britbox gift subscription and the show Vera was recommended to me. I thought about watching before reading, but since this is a series I’ve always intended to get to, and because it seems like most episodes aren’t actually adaptations of the books, I decided to prioritize the first few books which do make up the first season. I’m not terribly fussy about spoilers--my feeling generally is that if I am going to enjoy a book, I’ll enjoy it no matter what I know going in--but I do like to pay attention to and think about adaptation choices. So I bought the first few and made them my Christmas break reads! 

The Crow Trap (1999), the first book, is apparently unloved by fans because Vera doesn’t make an
appearance until midway through the book. Instead, the first half passes point of view duties between three scientists as they live together in a cottage while working on an environmental survey in advance of

a commercial quarry development. One of the women is grappling with the apparent suicide of her friend. One is having an affair with the developer. The third and youngest of the scientists whose mind we live in is murdered, and Vera Stanhope makes a dramatic entrance one third of the way into the book to solve her mystery. It’s even later still until the third person close POV drifts into Vera’s mind. Even then, after the point she bursts into the narrative, Vera’s main role is in squatting in the corner of the cottage encouraging the two surviving scientists in their own inquiries. When we get it, her inner monologues are more focused on her memories of the cottage and her father, with relatively little puzzling out of the case itself. If I were to describe Vera's characterization in this book, I’d call it impressionistic and literary:  she is a character, but in the model of literary mystery, the way she engages with the crime is through the lens of the personal. Her narration is devoted as much to remembering her father and childhood as it is to deducting and detecting. She doesn't feel quite like a person yet the way Jimmy Perez of Shetland did immediately. (I think Jimmy Perez is a fantastically written character.) It’s funny that Vera is so fuzzily characterized in the first book because all three of the other POV characters are very well defined, and very distinct from one another. 

Vera is strange in the book. On the surface there is a similarity to Detective Cockrill, whose presence in Brand’s books I dislike so very much (so far):  both are ominous presences, watchful, physically off-putting; both treat the civilians with a distinct lack of care. Like Cockrill, Vera is introduced as a cynic and a misanthrope. Vera actually reminds me a little of Christie’s Miss Marple, and I have got to think that it’s impossible that Cleeves wasn’t putting a spin on that character at least a little bit. Like Miss Marple, Vera uses her appearance (in this case, middle aged, overweight, unlovely) as a disguise, to lure her suspects into a false sense of safety. Like Marple, she moves in small towns and has an understanding of the dynamics and subaltern histories of small communities that can only be won through living in one for decades. And like Marple, her physique is sometimes a limit, and she may deputize others to ferret out bits of information to bring to her.

Even if The Crow Trap never did circle around to giving point-of-view into Vera’s mind, she would be an active investigator:  Vera manipulates the surviving women into serving as her delegates in interacting with suspects, especially encouraging their interest in the earlier suicide. Whether this is because she really thinks they may be on to something, or because she has an abiding interest in local gossip isn’t quite clear. Another key feature of  The Crow Trap is that the surrogates aren’t suspects. This makes their cooperation with one another and with the detective much more realistic and palatable. As the title alludes, they are bait, and while Vera’s thinking and motivations for this unorthodox gambit aren’t very deeply explored, it is a textual choice she has made, and her presence in their lives during tea times and evening drinks makes sense:  she's watching over them. Even while physically passive, Vera is mentally proactive, and the reader is very much aware of it.

I understand why fans would be confused by the structure of the first book, especially if they were coming from the show, but it doesn’t bother me. I can be ambivalent about alternating narrators, but I do like when books have an intentional structure like this one does, and I like when the reader is given more information than the characters. The first third of this book almost has a Rashomon structure, with different points of view on the same event. I also like that the characters themselves have secrets from each other and Vera, and that some of those secrets survive the book–a theme that continues through all three. 

The Crow Trap was published in 1999, and the second book, Telling Tales, was published in 2005. I wonder if Cleeves always intended this to be a series, or if perhaps The Crow Trap was written as a stand-alone novel. I could easily believe this. Telling Tales (2005) is, I think, more representative of the series: while the close third person POV does continue to shift between Vera and people related to the crime, the division is more even, with no delay in Vera's appearance. Vera is more deeply characterized in book two:  she emerges as a definite alcoholic; her dynamic with other officers and with her second is more clearly defined and described; and her complicated feelings about suspects and bystanders to crime is explored. At least in the next two books, she doesn’t explicitly deputize surrogates to detect for her, though her interest in and reliance on gossip remains. The Vera in Telling Tales has the feeling of a character being developed for a long series in the way that the character in The Crow Trap doesn’t. I wasn’t surprised to see similar themes and characterizations continued in Hidden Depths.

In the first book, I felt that the characterization and distinction of the side characters/secondary narrators/surrogate detectives was a strong point. This strength continues through the next two. Even with more intentional characterization, Vera herself continues to feel a little like an enigma, but Cleeves is good at creating point of view characters who have some involvement with the case. These characters don’t continue between books, and the way that they end can feel abrupt. I would guess that for some readers, this is upsetting:  open-endedness is somewhat at odds with a genre that inherently is about solving mysteries, uncovering secrets, and tying up loose ends. In Cleeves’ hands, I like it. I think it’s very intentional what she does and doesn’t choose to resolve, and I don’t mind that griefs are unresolved, that ruptures in relationships are unrepaired, that secrets stay secret.  

Though I did quite like the first two books, Hidden Depths (2007) was my favorite of the three, even though the solution to the mystery was abrupt and under-clued, with a particularly poor motive. I don’t think I read Cleeves for the mysteries, but rather for the pleasure of joining a sharp observer in putting small communities and complex personalities under a magnifying glass. I particularly liked this book because I think one of Cleeves’ strengths is scientific communities. One of the Shetland books I remember liking particularly was about bird watchers, and both books 1 and 3 touch on this community as well. Cleeves is good at describing the rituals and dynamics in isolated communities, particularly scientific communities, to people like me who have no experience with them and never will. 

With these three books out of the way, I’m ready to start watching the show, and I am very excited to see how Brenda Blethyn (a great actor!) interprets a character who is so complex on page. Even though it’s my understanding that the book and the show diverge fairly quickly, I am definitely planning to continue reading the Vera Stanhope books! Writing this made me want to cue up book four, but I will wait and finish the two books I'm working through right now first (both speculative fiction, though they have some overlap, so maybe they'll show up here).
 

2026 Predictions: Themes and Anti-Resolutions

I don’t like setting myself up to failed expectations around the new year, but I do think it’s fun to do a survey of the state of my reading, including some of the themes and categories I’m interested in reading in the coming year. And I do have some anti-resolutions:  authors or types of books that I am consciously going to try to read less of in 2026! 

Themes and Modest Goals

Series reading:  While I might read books in a series on an extended schedule, over years, I like to have a selection of series that I am actively reading. I hate being without a book, and get a lot of titles from long waits or interlibrary loan; rotating through a few series ensures I never have to decide and always have a book available when I need it. I’m also a bit of a mood reader, so I like to have several options depending on my mood and capacity! After auditioning quite a lot of new series in the first months of last year, I feel good about where I am in my series reading:  I’m persevering in my fraught relationship with Peter Robinson; I just started Ann Cleeves’ Vera (I’ll write about it soon!); and I have Jane Casey and Andrea Penrose to sprinkle in for lighter reads. This is a good stable of genres and authors to choose from. I wouldn’t be surprised if I finish at least one of these series in 2026.

Rereading:  Ever since I read The Searcher a year ago and was reminded of how much I like Tana French, I’ve had a yen to revisit her Dublin Murder Squad books! I may also continue with rereading some of Michael Connelly’s Jack McEvoy subseries, since I am more or less caught up with Bosch and Ballard. I would like to finish my reread of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey books this year. I haven’t mentioned it, but I’ve been similarly PD James over the last few years and while I don’t know that I’ll finish that project (her books can be so literary that I space them apart), I do want to continue! 

History of Mysteries:  My goal is to continue with Christianna Brand and with my ongoing read through of all of Agatha Christie. After rather disliking Anthony Berkeley’s The Wychford Poisonings last year, I want to give him another try:  I liked the mystery but hated the characters and the tone (so. much. spanking!). I’d also like to get back to Ngaoi Marsh, whose books I mostly enjoy but who I fell off of mid series:  I didn’t read any of her books last year! I may also explore some honkaku:  at a minimum, I’ve already bought The Decagon House Murders, so I will certainly read that! 

Cozies:  For a long time, I’ve had a goal to find some cozies that I like. I’m not on very good terms with the sub-genre, but the world is hard and it would be nice to have some lighter reads in the stable. I sampled some in 2025 without much luck, but my goal is to keep trying! 

Stand-alones and planned one-offs: I’m very much looking forward to reading another of Janice Hallett’s delicious epistolaries; I sampled The Examiner and am on the wait list for it at my library. Working in academia myself, I expect I'll either love it or have a lot of critique! I’ve decided one Hallett a year is probably reasonable pacing to keep these fresh. With a little trepidation, I intend to try Kemper Donovan’s ghost writer series (of course I know of him from the podcast, and the trepidation stems from being afraid I won't like it). One of the blogs I read often loves Perry Mason, so I’m going to give an Erle Stanley Gardner a try (I’ve already picked out my title and ordered it from the library!). 

Anti-Resolutions: Who I’m Giving Up in 2026

Instead of making resolutions about what exactly to read, I am giving myself anti-resolutions:  authors and categories I am giving myself permission not to read anymore! Though I may come back to them, I’m putting them back on the literal or proverbial shelf for the year: 

Margery Allingham:  There’s some stuff to like, but of the Queens, she is far and away my least favorite. I extremely struggled to finish the last book of hers I read. That was Death of a Ghost, which I thought at first was an improvement only to be disappointed. It exemplified one of the problems I have with Allingham:  her interminable endings that just seem to stretch on and on and on. 

Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus:  A lot of authors who I like (and thus whose taste I theoretically trust), love these books. The fictional Ruth Galloway is always enjoying the latest Ian Rankin book. But I just couldn’t get going with the series in 2025! I like some aspects, but there are also elements in the early books that I find extremely repellent, especially in audio. The early part of the series, at least, is not for me. I might pick up the series a little later in to see if I like it better:  maybe there’s a point where the author finds his stride. 

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club: Nothing against the man personally, he seems clever and nice. And nothing against fans of the series: I can see why you like them, there’s a lot of charm here! I just can’t get into these books. There’s an ironic remove between the characters and the narrator that I commonly encounter in British fiction. I don’t mind it in some cases (i.e. Mick Herron’s loathsome spies), but I just can’t connect with this series or its characters and I think I’m done trying. I do plan to try the movie adaptation, though.

Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct:  Maybe!? These came so highly recommended that I am loathe to give up, and I haven’t even been able to finish book one! Usually I give series 2-3 books to find their footing, but every once in a while I dislike a book so much that I question the policy, and Cop Hater is a struggle. Even though it's extremely short. I do still want to give the series a fair shake since it’s beloved, but maybe not this year, and like Rankin, maybe I’ll try a later book in the series to see if the aspects I dislike have improved at all. 

Literary mysteries: I have so many blog drafts of articles about literary mysteries that came out in the last couple of years, and I’ve held back on publishing them because they spiral out into sour rants. This is my anti-resolution that I’m most likely to fail because I am perpetually tempted back by positive reviews from prestigious outlets! But for my own happiness, I’d really like to take a year off from reading literary mysteries! Except for a few trusted authors, I can't think of the last time I truly enjoyed a new one. If I were to break down the genres and sub-genres is the books I don't finish, I think literary mysteries might top it. So no more! I'm taking a year off! Probably. 

That does it for my thematic predictions and my anti-resolutions! If I'm still writing a year from now, it will be interesting to see how I do ... when I made art resolutions for 2025, I immediately forgot them, but I ended up doing most of them anyway! Maybe the biggest prediction of all:  I expect this post to fall into the memory hole instantly, and anything I do to meet these predictions will be entirely by accident!

2025 Year End: The Twixties

2025 was a roller coaster in my personal life. I spent the first half of the year recovering from eye surgery. While this was ultimately a positive change, I was more or less blind for several months. The household was plagued by sickness,work had a lot of burnout and drama, and this fall I had an injury that seemed minor at the time but has spiraled into relapses and ongoing treatment. All this against the backdrop of constant static anxiety from living in America and working in a field very much under attack by the far right. I read a fair amount, but didn’t have the wonderful experience I had with Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway in 2024, where a book series captured my heart and mind and gave me solace all year. But reading (and art) were still probably the best things in my life in 2025. Instead of a straight top ten list, here are some off the cuff awards–which are reminding me with a sting that I really should at the very least keep a running list of titles that I read because it’s hard to remember!

Favorite reread: The Unpleasantness at the Bellonna Club by Dorothy Sayers
Peak early Lord Peter! Maybe peak Lord Peter across the board? Favorite rereads are books that are more interesting and engaging on the revisit, and even though I did and do reread fairly often, this book was deeply rewarding to revisit as an adult after last reading it as a teen. Read more of my thoughts about it here.

Spunkiest Sleuth: Wilowjean “Will” Parker, Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood
AKA my cozy category. I only read book one in this series but I am looking forward to continuing. I liked the queer characters and themes, the mid 20th century setting, and the brash Will and self-possessed Lillian. The detective and apprentice (or detective and chronologist) is a dynamic I enjoy, and Will is the apprentice in this series. Spunk in a cozy novel is often badly done and illogical, existing to propel characters into stupid decisions. But Will feels human, smart and brave; she makes mistakes, but for believable reasons.

Slowest burn (complimentary): Charlotte Sloane and Lord Wrexford, Wrexford & Sloane series by Andrea Penrose
Set in the Regency, this series features Charlotte Sloane, a widow who makes broadside cartoons under her dead spouse’s pseudonym, and Lord Wrexford, a member of the British aristocracy who is also a gentleman scientist. Unlike mixed genre novels that put romance before mystery and always end with a couple together, Penrose is satisfyingly patient in allowing the pair to grow as individuals and in relation to each other over a span of books. There’s also the rare well-written child urchin characters with a sweet found family angle. I’d also give these a hat tip as my favorite historical mysteries of the year: though the Regency is one of the most popular settings in historical fiction, they feel unique and well-researched because of their interest in science and early forensics. Penrose captures science of the era very well, imbuing it with the sense of both discovery and precarity that is easily lost (or, worse, treated as a joke) in historical fiction.

Best road trip company: Lane Holland series, Wake and Murder Town by Shelley Burr
Because of aforementioned vision issues, I tend to bring the podcasts, audiobooks and the music to road trips while others bring the vehicles and the driving. Shelley Burr’s Lane Holland books were a great success on a trip with a family member with whom I share a fondness for Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk series. Like Harper, Burr writes about the impact of crime on small communities in Australia. I particularly liked Murder Town with its scrutiny on true crime tourism. That said, these books are't too deep: they're propulsive and plotty, like all good roadtrip listens should be. I’m looking forward to book three getting an American release!

Favorite Setting: The WW2 Blitz hospital, Green for Danger by Christianna Brand
I wrote about this recently so I won’t repeat myself, but I’ve thought a lot about this setting in time and place in the several months since I read the book! For me, setting is both time and place, both physical (can I picture the layout in my mind as I listen or read?) and atmospheric. Brand succeeds at all in the second Cockrill book. I wouldn't want to go there, but I can imagine it in detail!

Most indispensable (AKA favorite criticism or reference source): The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards’
This masterful history of crime writing was surprisingly easy to follow on audio, but not so much the footnotes, so I asked for the book for Christmas in 2024. I spent a lot of time with it in 2025, exploring it for recommendations. It has made me feel much more confident in my understanding of the genre.

Favorite true crime: Lay Them to Rest by Laura Norton
Though I listen to some podcasts, I don’t actually read a great deal of true crime: I’m really picky about it because I hate when it’s schlocky or feels exploitative. Familiar with Norton from her podcast The Fall Line (which is great, and very ethical for that medium), I knew I’d like this book. It’s fascinating and heartfelt and taught me a great deal about cold cases and about how genealogical investigation works. It was a good pairing to the true crime podcast I listened to the most according to my podcatcher stats, which was DNA:ID, all about cases solved by genetic genealogy! 

Most haunting (AKA all around best): Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie
No, it’s not a category for ghost stories: it’s just the mystery novel I thought about literally the most all year long. Gosh this was good! What a stunner! Maybe Christie’s finest??? Someday I’ll write an essay about it here :)

I have some reading predictions and goals for 2026, but I'll save them for another post so as not to dilute the glory of these works' inclusion on to the first annual Twixties!  

Green for Danger (1944), Christianna Brand

 After feeling so enthusiastic about Christianna Brand’s first Inspector Cockrill book, I picked up Green for Danger (1944) when I was in the mood to get back to reading classics instead of contemporary procedurals. Because I found that the first book is pretty much universally regarded as the worst by other bloggers when I did a tour of posts about it, I was expecting Green for Danger to be significantly better. In that regard, I was disappointed:  I don’t think this book was a huge leap forward over the first. It had many of the same problems, some new issues, and some things that bothered me more to see repeated than they did the first time around. I enjoyed it more, but mostly because of the stupendous setting and tone.

What got Better

In my warm response to Heads You Lose, I gushed about the temporal World War II setting and oh boy, was this book a treat for a history buff! From the opening pages, when the setting was announced as in an old children’s sanatorium converted to a military hospital during the Blitz, I was excited. This is so unbelievably in my wheel house of historical interests, and it did not disappoint. I loved the dread and fear that permeated a book set during a time of active warfare. I loved how the service brought together a much more diverse circle of suspects than your typical group of country house friends. I was delighted to learn more about some historical medical treatments and equipment in detail. And, most of all, I loved the details of the hospital, especially the lives and interactions of the patients (mostly men), and the lives and the complex interactions between the hospital staff. The setting, the time period, the side characters:  all fantastic and fascinating. Above being a mystery, this is a wonderful historical novel full of tremendous and interesting detail about the homefront during the Blitz, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in that history. Written and published before the end of the war, this is a primary source, and it is a fascinating one.

What Didn’t Change Enough

The Detective

I wrote about how I disliked the minimal role that Inspector Cockrill, “Cocky” himself, played in the first book, and I can’t say that this was improved much in Green for Danger. He certainly spends more time on the page, and he has some rather interesting personal connections to some of the suspects in the closed circle. But I don’t have much more sense of him as a character or as a detective. He is a stinky chain smoker who is a little mean to suspects, but is he a good detective? Is he smart? Why does he do it? What are his methods? What is his philosophy of crime? Did he even solve this case, or (as I did) just narrow it down to two? Beats me! A detective doesn’t need to be heavily present on the page, detecting and narrating in plain view, for a mystery to be engaging, but in a series I want to know more about how the detective thinks so that I can put myself in their boots while considering the clues. Not everyone is as good at Christie as articulating a detective’s philosophy and framing a plot within it, but those that aren’t tend to have the detective on page, detecting, like Marsh’s Alleyn. It simply and profoundly doesn’t work for me that Brand keeps Cocky mostly off page and that his point of view remains a cypher to me after two books. 

Because Cockrill isn’t detecting, that means that, like Heads, in Green a great deal of the detectorial speculation is done by the suspects themselves. In this book I found this bothered me a great deal. A theme of Heads was us-versus-them, the utter disbelief that the very rich suspects carried amongst themselves that someone in their rarefied group of lifelong friends could have committed terrible crimes. It makes sense for those characters to group together and talk through what they imagine the detective might make of the case because they trust each other and they don’t trust him! Though I still chafed at how minimally present the detective was in this detective novel, I was also willing to accept the reasons why he was off page, and why Brand delivered the detection and case-building through the eyes and minds of that particular group of suspects. It made sense and felt thematic. 

This didn’t apply to the same degree in Green, where the closed circle is a group of doctors and nurses all working together in the wartime hospital, three men and three women. Some of the characters in the small group of suspects have relationships, even close ones:  the three women live together and are friendly; the group contains an affianced couple; and the older surgeon and young anesthetist are from the nearby community where they worked together before the war. But except for the final pair, these characters were mostly strangers before the war brought them together in service and they don’t necessarily have much in common, particularly in their varying economic backgrounds and prospects. They haven’t the deep wells of trust, shared history, and class solidarity that bind together the group in Heads. I suppose they are trauma bonded, but the horrifying stress of war and murder doesn't necessarily bring people together, especially when they know that one of them has killed and attempted to kill and may kill again. It didn’t feel believable to me when the characters start idly chatting about how one of them must be a murderer while waiting together to be spoken to by Cockrill. I actually put the book down for about a week after this scene and read something else before I got back to it, it disappointed me and broke my immersion that much. When it happened again towards the end of the book, when the proof of murder had been found, my eyes rolled so hard. I fear this may be a characteristic of Brand’s mysteries, like Poirot gathering the suspects is a trope of Christie, and I don’t like it. 

The characters

I felt the characterization of different members of the closed circle was a mixed bag in Heads. I didn’t think this was better in Green, and may have felt it slightly worse. Oh, some were still finely and deeply drawn. But I think more of the group were shallowly depicted, especially since Brand spends much of the book trying to clue out the suspect while misdirecting towards others by hiding their backgrounds and refusing any point-of-view forays into their minds. It leads to characters who spend the majority of the book as little more than tropes:  the Good Anesthetist, the Sweet Old Man Doctor, the Pretty Nurse, the Inexplicably Attractive Rake Surgeon. The characters who are written more deeply are wonderful–I loved both Esther, a young spinster and adult Blitz orphan, and Woody, a comparatively older, unmarried woman with a bohemian background and implied greater sexual and social experience than her housemates. Woody is my favorite, but I think she is harmed by Brand holding back on her interiority and background to cast suspicion on her:  she’s such an unusual character in contrast to the two other women (who are rather common types of stock characters) that I yearned to spend more time with her. Two out of six is pretty poor ratio, though about the same as in Heads. I think Green was ultimately more disappointing in this area than the first book because I was expecting more. Esther and Woody both have scenes where their characterization is much better than anything in Heads, but ultimately, though it had a lower ceiling, I felt the characterization in the previous book was more consistent. 

What got Worse 

The victims:  I raved about the humane treatment of the victims in Heads, and while they weren’t bad in Green, they weren’t treated with the same degree of respect and interest. Cockrill is not a detective who looks to the psychology and life of the victims to solve crimes, to the detriment of the books. As a seasoned acolyte of Poirot, who does pay attention to such things, I didn’t think this book provided much challenge. Like Poirot, I looked to these things, and almost immediately narrowed the solution down to two.

The plot:  the mystery and the reveals were very obvious. Some reveals I felt myself waiting impatiently on for the characters to catch up. In particular, the method of murder isn’t explained until 72% of the way through the audiobook, but it’s so incredibly obvious that I felt impatient and frustrated as I waited for the reveal. I'm not even sure if it was supposed to be a mystery, what with the clue in the title. Never a good sign, and if I didn’t like the setting so much, the sort of thing that can make me dislike a book. While the motive for the murder is truly interesting, certainly more than in the first book, it isn’t very mysterious. 

I think the plot feels poor because, as I suggested above, Brand’s efforts at misdirection and obfuscation result in uneven characterization. Speaking for books generally, not every character needs to be drawn to the same degree of psychological realism and humanity as another! But it stands out in Brand because these six are our main characters and points of view into the story, because Cockrill is not really a protagonist, because the suspects narrate the mystery. Brand is excellent at writing characters, so it’s frustrating that her efforts to cover up a rather simple and obvious mystery resulted in under-characterization. 

 Conclusion

All that said, Green for Danger has an absolutely stellar denouement that played on Brand's strengths as a character writer. It's rare to have a mystery novel end up with a gut punch that is entirely unrelated to the crime, and I loved it. When Brand's character writing is good, it is very, very good! Combined with the wonderful setting, I still overall enjoyed this book and quickly recommended it. Even with my dislike of Cockrill, I'll happily keep reading the series!