His memory is shot through with holes and as the investigation progresses his mental state worsens. After the disappearance of his friends, his family moved and he was sent to boarding school, where he developed the English accent that marks him as an outsider. His is a moving portrayal of trauma and its impact on the mind. Dishonesty, it turns out, is not his primary flaw. Rob, as narrator, warns at the start that detectives routinely lie to gain information. Although I was initially put off by the narrator’s insistence that this is an authentic crime novel (with meta references to X Files and the “casting room” no less) it eventually won me over with a gripping plot and rich characters and setting. Could the two cases be linked? Suspects proliferate: the father who is protesting the motorway sexual predators pagan devil-worshippers the developers with dodgy links to politicians the archaeologists. The kicker is that Katy was also 12, and found in the same place where Rob’s friends disappeared. He and his partner Cassie Maddox are assigned to the murder of Katy Devlin, whose body was found on a Bronze Age sacrificial altar at an archaeological site that is being surveyed ahead of a motorway development. Adam, now going by Rob, is a detective in the Dublin police force’s murder squad. It’s a tantalising beginning, but this mystery is not the focus of this effective, twisty crime novel, even if it lurks everpresent in the background like a pagan dream.

Their youthful joy quickly turns to terror, with two of them vanishing, presumed dead, leaving Adam Ryan catatonic, shoes filled with someone else’s blood, and slashes down the back of his t-shirt. Three 12-year-old children go into an Irish woodland in a 1980s summer.

In the woods french tana