Our showcase of first in a series books is coming to an end, but we’d like to highlight one more series: The Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French. The first book is In the Woods. Detective Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are called to investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in the woods of a Dublin suburb. Detective Ryan has a personal and traumatic connection to those woods. He was the only one of three children who was found after going missing in those woods twenty years earlier. He’d been found clinging to a tree with his sneakers filled with blood and unable to tell the police anything. The investigation in the present contains disturbing echoes of the past, and French masterfully increases the psychological pressure on Detective Ryan as the investigation proceeds and he tries to keep his childhood connection to the woods a secret. This series is unique in that each installment features a new lead detective that was introduced as a secondary character in an earlier volume. It features compelling cases and characters, a strong sense of place, a carefully created atmosphere that pervades each book as it portrays life in modern Dublin. To place a hold, go to www.infosoup.org. Digital versions of the book and audiobook are available in the Wisconsin Digital Library.
