Tana French breaks one of the mystery genre's prime conventions in In the Woods, which is that murders must be solved, even cold cases from twenty years ago. Her central character, Adam Ryan, was playing in the woods with two friends who disappeared, leaving him behind. He was traumatized by the experience, and, when he was found two days later, had lost all memory of the event.
Flash forward twenty years, and Adam is an investigator in the murder squad. When a child is murdered near the same woods that Adam's friends disappeared from, he and his partner dive into the investigation and he becomes quickly convinced that there's a connection to the old case. In the end, though, there isn't actually a connection, and Adam descends into a breakdown; in fact, the old case is never resolved, and Adam is left in disgrace.
French has left us some ambiguous clues to the first case, and I saw some threads where readers had some ingenious solutions to the case, but I think that they're missing the point. The novel is more of an existential statement -- some mysteries are truly insoluble, particularly to the people most tied up in them. Adam is in a sort of limbo; he consciously wants to never think about the old events (he tells us so many, many times), but his subconscious drives him to solve the mystery. In the end, the contradiction is too great, and he runs away from every attempt to actually resolve his issues.
Jenna bought me R. A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome, just about the only one of his books I don't own. It's an interesting read from a number of perspectives. The subject matter itself is moderately interesting, and Lafferty is a lively writer, making it easier to keep track of the many personages who wander through the history. But it's also interesting as a lens through which to view Lafferty's fiction. He has the same themes; the forces of disorder are constantly nibbling at the edges of established order, and will eventually bring it down. He's got the same ideas of archetypes recurring again and again (in Fall, one of the Goths is Cain, waiting to swoop in and destroy his brother and the Roman empire).
His other typical touches work well with a history from this period. One of the oddities of Lafferty's style is a third-person seemingly-omniscient narrator who will nevertheless flat-out tell you that things couldn't have happened the way he just told you they did. Here, he does something similar -- he'll quote a source, then tell you it makes no sense, but after all the source was there and we weren't.
From the fall of the Empire, I jumped back to just before its start, in John Maddox Roberts's Catiline Conspiracy, a historical mystery set at the time of the Catiline Conspiracy (who'da thunk it?). Roberts's protagonist, a low-level noble named Decius Metellus, is an engaging narrator, and the minor characters are enjoyable. But he has a fundamental problem with fictionalizing the conspiracy -- in the end, the conspirators weren't that competent (which is why Cicero was able to stop them so easily). So he adds in a sort of super-conspiracy, of which Catiline was just the most visible part, and I found it to be not so convincing. I enjoy the narration, but Roberts is a little too tied-down by the real history, so I may just jump ahead a couple of books -- the next one goes from a real case that Cicero tried, but after that he has Decius working on cases too minor to be part of the historical record.
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