In the Woods, an Edgar-Award winner for Best First Mystery Novel opens with a sinister two-page prologue set in a hazy 1980s summer in Ireland. Through a veil of recollection that is too chilling to be nostalgic, we see three children in playing in the woods adjacent to Knocknaree, a small town just outside Dublin. Gradually we realize that something terrible is waiting to happen to these children.

Then we cut to the present-day. A sarcastic thirty year-old detective explains in a ferociously ironic and insightful passage his relationship to truth and lies and how he uses both as tools of interrogation – something at which he is very skilled. This is Rob Ryan, our anti-hero. He is one of those three children from the prologue: the only one, in fact, to escape the mysterious tragedy that befell his playmates.

No one knows what happened to his two best friends Peter and Jamie that summer that the three of them were twelve years old. Rob (who has since dropped his boyhood name Adam) knows least of all: found later on, clinging to a tree and wearing torn clothing and blood-soaked shoes, he retained no memory of whatever he might have witnessed and escaped. After a few years, the cops gave up on him and he managed to sink into obscurity. His friends were never found.

Is this spooky or what? Rob rarely thinks of his past. He's too caught up in the excitement of getting appointed to the highly prestigious Murder Squad. He has a talented and enigmatic partner named Cassie with whom he has a close, intuitive working relationship: think of them as a young and hip Mulder and Scully from The X-Files (Rob is very aware of the obvious comparison) without the believer-versus-skeptic dichotomy.

The story opens with an intriguing homicide case that happens to fall into the laps of Rob and Cassie who are still relatively inexperienced and eager for their first big case. The dead body of young Katy Devlin has been found at an archaeological dig in the Irish countryside. The Murder Squad superintendent O'Kelly assigns the Devlin case during a slow lunch hour when no one else but Cassie is present to volunteer for it. Then Rob realizes that the crime scene is in Knocknaree and the case has disturbing parallels to his own traumatic experience when he was twelve.

Cassie knows about Rob's past, and wonders if they should ask O'Kelly to reassign the case. However, Rob, who is not very self-aware, thinks he can handle it. Plus, they're both eager to work their biggest homicide yet. Soon they will regret their decision. Evidence found at the crime scene – blood traces that could be decades old – raises the potential that the Devlin case and the twenty year-old case involving Rob and his missing friends could be linked.

Professional ethics require Rob to remove himself from the case. How can he possibly conduct an unbiased investigation when he is the only witness – and maybe even a suspect – in an unsolved, but possibly related, crime from years ago? If he and Cassie are found out, it could mean the end of their careers.

But they go forward with the investigation, seduced by the strangeness of the case. Meanwhile Rob's emotional involvement deepens from merely wanting a career challenge to feeling a mingled dread and hope that he might remember what happened to him and his boyhood friends. As the investigation progresses, Rob starts to unravel psychologically. At the same time, Cassie unexpectedly falls for him – which is the last thing he can handle right then. The inevitable disintegration of their friendship is as painful to read as it is fascinating.

Speaking of fascinating, there's the case itself: poor dead Katy, a talented ballerina, seemed to be the most normal person in her family. Her mother is slow-witted, her older sister is sleekly self-controlled, her younger sister might be autistic, and her father has many enemies in the community. In addition, Rob starts to remember some sinister things about Mr. Devlin who was a teenager the summer Rob was twelve.

Cassie and Rob must consider many suspects, starting with the archaeologists who are excavating an historic site near the woods. One of them found the girl's body arranged on an altar stone. Could Katy's death have resulted from a conflict between those who want to preserve the historical site and those who want to raze it for development? Cassie and Rob gain a helper for their investigation: Sam, a shrewd and kind coworker who has connections with the developers and the local political scene.

Sam is a few years younger than they are, and he lacks their insecurity as well as their need to cover it with ferociously edgy posturing. Of course Cassie and Rob reinforce their own exclusivity by relegating Sam to fifth-wheel status, and treating him with condescending fondness. One of the pleasures of the book is seeing how little that bothers Sam whom Rob gradually begins to realize is a stronger and more complex person than he first thought.

All three characters are marvelously three-dimensional. Cassie is so intuitive that she almost seems psychic. Her extensive knowledge of the typical mindset of a psychopath provides an especially chilling undercurrent to the story. When the murderer's identity is unveiled, I just about fell out of my chair; it was so unexpected. The murderer turns out to be one of those stone-cold psychopaths, and only Cassie is qualified by past experience to deal with such a creature. Cassie's interactions with the murderer are extremely suspenseful.

Then there is Rob, our first-person narrator, who somehow elicits the reader's profound sympathy even when he is engaging in deeply selfish and destructive behavior. Rob is an utter train-wreck of a character who demands our unblinking, morbid attention. Someone who dates him at one point has the sense to dump him fast, recognizing the difference between a man who is interesting and one who is merely screwed up. She advises him to pursue younger women who are too inexperienced to make that distinction.

The author gives Rob an unforgettable voice and a vivid, if critical, perspective on the world. Consider his description of an annoying colleague from page 378: "He was like a huge smug albatross waddling around my desk, squawking vacuously and crapping all over my paperwork."

In the Woods is a mystery masterpiece that delivers so much on so many levels. It's hard to believe that it's a debut novel. It definitely deserves its Edgar Award, and I'll be looking for more books by this author in the future. In the Woods can be found on Amazon.com through this link: In the Woods and its sequel can be found here: The Likeness: A Novel