Seeing is believing, and uncertainty, the opposite of believing, is French’s game. Switching back and forth breaks the spell and suggests a connection between the two stories that does not exist, the sort of baroque conspiracy that’s antithetical to French’s more intimate concerns.įrench’s witchy explorations of subjectivity and its discontents could well be unfilmable. Each narrative has a dreamlike quality that only prevails if it’s allowed to unfold, unbroken in the voice of the character experiencing it. More importantly, In the Woods is Rob’s story The Likeness is Cassie’s. No homicide detective would take a hiatus from an active investigation as sensitive as Katy Devlin’s murder to assume an undercover identity, not even for a weekend.
One is simply logistical the fusion turns two improbable but engaging stories into a ludicrous farrago. His partner, Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene), with whom Rob has an enviably close and harmonious platonic relationship, is the only person who knows about Rob’s past, but even Rob doesn’t really understand what happened to him in the summer of his 12 th year.Ĭombining these plots is a terrible idea for multiple reasons. The narrator of In the Woods, Rob Reilly (Killian Scott)-Rob Ryan in the books-has his own history, decades old, in the woods where Katy Devlin’s body is discovered on an ancient altar by a team of archaeologists. Her books are all about the psychological undercurrents, how the case breaks apart the detective narrator and makes it impossible for him to go on as he has been. But in French’s fiction, such puzzles are only the bait on the hook. But Christie novels have a sturdy, complex scaffolding of plot tricked out with a full complement of twists, which Phelps updates by adding psychological undercurrents to Christie’s ingenious parlor games.įrench’s first novel, In the Woods, by contrast, is notoriously easy to figure out if you think the point is to determine who killed the 12-year-old girl whose corpse is found in a forest at the beginning of the book. Murders, all in the last few years-in which she made such anti-cozy moves as casting John Malkovich as Hercule Poirot. for holiday season adaptations of Agatha Christie novels- And Then There Were None, The Witness for the Prosecution, and The A.B.C. Still, Dublin Murders might have made for a pleasingly mopey whodunit along the lines of Shetland or Broadchurch if Phelps weren’t so obviously unsure of her source material.
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