Review: What Lies in the Woods

What Lies in the Woods by Kate Alice Marshall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Naomi Shaw (Cunningham) is another in what seems to be a never-ending parade of unlikable characters propelling their tales to the top of book lists—and I have to say that it’s a trend I hope disappears as quickly as it came into vogue.

The story is that of Naomi and her two childhood friends, Cass and Liv. Together, the three survive a chance and violent encounter with a suspected serial killer. It is Naomi, however, who ends up carrying the scars of that day on her body and in the very fabric of her being. The lies that surround the event, like a stagnant marsh, seep between cracks in the lives of each of these characters as they make the journey to adulthood, eventually drowning them in rank and fetid waters. The resulting rot manifests differently for each, and the truth of what really happened is unwound in slow-turning pages that expose the dark underbelly of what it means to be a victim.

There’s a LOT going on here—a wide-net cast in an effort to keep the reader guessing. To that end, the author succeeds. In the final third of the book, though, I found it sometimes difficult to follow the convoluted series of misadventures that culminated (finally) in a “show down” during which I felt as if I didn’t have a horse in the race—I simply didn’t give a damn who lived, who died, who suffered or who got the short end of the proverbial stick. I was disengaged, uninvested and ready for the whole thing to just be OVER. A more direct route to the end would have perhaps earned this an additional star.

Three stars for this author’s ability to keep her own story straight as she brought together myriad parts that reminded me of a box of legos—just too complicated to make the read feel worthwhile.

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