In The Wood

I'm still mulling over how I feel about In The Wood and I think I have a love/hate relationship with it. In a way, it reminds me of that Jodie Foster movie about gang rape, (The Accused)which I thought was a great movie and yet would never watch it again because parts of it were so painful. I really liked In the Wood. The story is compelling-and it's hard to write in the first person and have it be believable, especially when the narrator is unreliable at best. Adam Robert Rogers ran off to play with his two friends as a 12 year-old. They went to the woods near their houses, and when they didn't come back for dinner, a search party was sent to look for them. Adam was found hours later, clinging to a tree so hard that bark was under his fingernails and there was blood in his shoes that had soaked from the shoes into his socks-and it wasn't his. Of his friends, there was no trace. 20 years later, Adam has adopted his middle name as his first name, become a policeman and has a partner that he adores. And now a little girl has had her skull crushed at Bronze Age altar, not that far from where Adam/Rob grew up. Are they connected?

Rob is not the epitome of an unreliable narrator-he calls things like he sees them. What he doesn't see is everything he's done to run away from his past will come back to smack him in the face. And he doesn't see how self-deluding he is-that's left to his partner, Cassie Maddox. So why wouldn't I read it again? Me, who loves to reread my favorite books?
It's really depressing. Really, really depressing. And it's clear from the begin inning that some thing bad is going to happen (something other than the little girl being killed, I mean) and you don't know if it's going to happen to Rob (if he dies or actually turns out to be the murderer, like in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which was my first encounter with an unreliable narrator) or if he gets sent to prison or if Cassie dies or what. The sense of foreboding is palpable. Let me be clear, everybody lives at the end and in some ways that worse. No one comes out of this looking good and everyone has a reason for doing what they did-and others can't forgive them for it. And it irritated me that one murder was solved but the other mystery was not. All those odd details and no resolution?
So, I'm still thinking about it. It was good-really good but I don't think I can reread it.