Books like In the Woods

The Likeness picks up where In the Woods leaves off, both literally and thematically. Cassie Maddox, Rob Ryan's partner from the first book, goes undercover as a dead woman who looks exactly like her, infiltrating a group of postgraduate students living together in a crumbling country house. French uses the undercover premise to ask hard questions about identity and belonging: how long can you pretend to be someone else before you start losing yourself?

The rural Irish setting drips with the same fog and unease that defined Knocknaree, and Cassie's growing attachment to her assumed life creates a tension that has nothing to do with the murder she is supposed to be solving. French writes group dynamics with surgical precision, and the five housemates feel like real people with real grievances. The pacing is slower than most thrillers, but every scene does double duty, advancing the plot while deepening the psychological portrait.

If you loved the character work in In the Woods, The Likeness delivers that same quality with a fresh protagonist.

Dennis Lehane's Mystic River shares In the Woods' obsession with how childhood trauma echoes through adult lives. Three boys from a working-class Boston neighborhood are forever changed when one of them is abducted and assaulted. Twenty-five years later, a murder pulls them back together, and Lehane traces the fault lines between their present selves and the kids they used to be.

The parallel to Rob Ryan's situation is direct: both stories ask what happens when the past literally returns to the place where it started. Lehane writes Boston the way French writes Dublin, as a character in its own right, with class tensions and neighborhood loyalties shaping every interaction. The prose is muscular where French's is lyrical, but both authors refuse to simplify their characters into heroes and villains.

Jimmy, Sean, and Dave each carry damage differently, and the novel's final act forces readers to sit with moral ambiguity rather than easy answers. The police investigation runs alongside the emotional one, and neither provides the resolution you want.

Donna Tartt's The Secret History approaches the mystery genre from an unexpected angle: you know who committed the murder from the first page. The question is why, and the answer takes you through a group of classics students at a small Vermont college who become so consumed by their intellectual pursuits that they cross into genuine danger. The atmospheric campus setting works the same way the Dublin woods do in French's novel, creating a sealed world where normal rules bend and break.

Richard Papen, the narrator, is an outsider drawn into a closed circle, and his unreliable perspective keeps you guessing about what he is choosing not to tell you. Tartt writes about the seductive power of belonging to a group, and the price that belonging demands. The prose is deliberate and richly detailed, rewarding patient readers who want to live inside a story rather than race through it.

Both books trust their readers to sit with discomfort and accept that not every thread will be pulled tight.

Kate Atkinson's Case Histories introduces Jackson Brodie, a former police officer turned private investigator in Cambridge, England, and it moves between three separate cold cases that slowly reveal their connections. The structure mirrors the layered storytelling French uses in In the Woods, where past and present timelines comment on each other. Atkinson writes about loss and family with dark humor and genuine warmth, and her characters are flawed in specific, recognizable ways.

Brodie carries his own grief over a sister's murder, making him a close cousin to Rob Ryan and his buried childhood trauma. The Cambridge setting is less overtly menacing than French's Dublin woods, but Atkinson finds menace in ordinary domestic spaces, in kitchens and gardens and family homes where terrible things happen. Each cold case illuminates something about the others, and the novel rewards readers who pay attention to small details.

The tone is warmer than In the Woods, but the emotional intelligence is comparable.

Broken Harbor is the fourth book in French's Dublin Murder Squad series and stands as one of her darkest. Detective Scorcher Kennedy investigates the stabbing of a father and two children in a half-finished housing estate called Brianstown, a ghost development left empty by the financial crash. The setting is desolate in a way that recalls the woods of Knocknaree: a place built on promises that were never kept. French uses the Celtic Tiger collapse as more than backdrop, turning it into a driving force of the plot.

Kennedy is a control freak who believes in order and procedure, and watching his certainties dissolve as the case grows stranger makes for stomach-knotting reading. Baby monitors pointed at holes in the walls. An animal living inside the house. A family that seemed normal to everyone who knew them.

French layers the domestic horror with Kennedy's own family secrets, creating a book where the personal and professional investigations feed on each other. The ending is bleak and earned.

Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts tells the story of the Barrett family through the eyes of Merry, who was eight when her teenage sister Marjorie began showing signs of what might be demonic possession or might be schizophrenia. The family agrees to a reality TV show, and fifteen years later, Merry gives an interview about what really happened. Like Rob Ryan in In the Woods, Merry is an adult trying to reconstruct childhood memories she cannot fully trust.

The novel layers three timelines: the events themselves, a blog analyzing the TV show, and the present-day interview, and the contradictions between them are where the real horror lives. Tremblay refuses to confirm whether anything supernatural occurred, just as French refuses to explain what happened to Rob's friends in the woods. Both books understand that the scariest thing is not knowing.

The family dynamics are specific and painful, and the class anxieties of a family desperate enough to put their daughter on television give the story its social weight.

Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street seems at first like a straightforward horror novel about Ted, a lonely man living in a boarded-up house with his cat and his daughter. But something is wrong with the timeline. Something is wrong with the house.

And something is definitely wrong with Ted's memories. Ward structures the book as a series of reveals that reframe everything you thought you knew, much like French does with the Knocknaree woods mystery. The narrative alternates between Ted's perspective, the cat's perspective (yes, the cat narrates chapters), and a woman watching the house who believes Ted kidnapped her sister years ago.

Each perspective contradicts the others, and the reader must sort truth from delusion without a reliable guide. Ward writes about trauma and dissociation with clinical specificity, grounding the supernatural atmosphere in real psychological conditions. The book is shorter than In the Woods but packs a similar emotional punch, and the final revelation is the kind that sends you back to page one.