The Girl in the Woods by Gregg Olsen Book Review
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I recently read this book because I enjoyed another novel by Gregg Olsen If You Tell. The Girl in the Woods is a fictional story, unlike the true crime story told in If You Tell, but Olsen’s descriptive narrative is captivating regardless. I have some very in-depth thoughts about this book that I share (rant about) at the end of this post. I do give a spoiler alert so, if you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading there.
The Girl in the Woods follows a forensic examiner named Birdy Waterman. It is the first in a series called Waterman and Stark. Kendall Stark is a criminal investigator and they work together to solve a complicated case surrounding the disappearance of a young girl, a body found in the woods, and a ruthless killer pulling strings from behind bars.
One of the things I love the most about Olsen’s stories is the setting. They all take place in Washington state, among the pine trees and foggy mornings. It’s a dreamy setting with a history of being popular with serial killers. Olsen lives in Washington and captures a piece of what makes that area of the world so beautiful.
Gregg Olsen writes transitions between points of view flawlessly. I was pleasantly surprised, time and time again when we would follow a scene with multiple characters and float through their perspectives like a 360 camera. There were no jarring interruptions to the narrative, it was somehow never confusing, and artfully done. Olsen is a seasoned writer and it shows.
While I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it was the plot that left me unsatisfied. The set up for the crime, the crimes themselves, and the constant mystery off whodunit was perfect. But when the killer is revealed, there was a pretty big shift in character motivations that was inconsistent and a little frustrating for me, as a reader.
There are several possible suspects in the story that make you wonder who killed this poor girl. Her art teacher is accused of being a pedophile and while those concerns are dismissed by Kendall Stark when she realizes it is just small-town folk being homophobic, she still stands out as someone who might have been inappropriate with the child. Eventually, it is revealed that the character is in a relationship with a prison guard that also had a relationship with a murderer, so part of me wondered about whether the art teacher did know more about this than she let on. There’s a scene later in the book where the prison guard girlfriend confesses to the relationship and the art teacher breaks up with her, earning the reader’s trust. So it makes sense that it wasn’t the art teacher because her character is consistent and well rounded.
Then we have the prison guard. She’s been doing the bidding for this murderer behind bars. They shared a romantic evening on top of a dog grooming table (no, I’m not kidding – why was there a dog grooming table in the prison to begin with?) and so we already don’t trust her. She works with the missing girl’s mom, who turned the killer and the guard in. The mom received a lot of threats, so it is plausible that the guard killed the girl. But no, it wasn’t her either.
There’s also a woman in the same town that murders her husband and Waterman and Stark are sort of sidelined by the case the whole time. They are calling the woman a black widow and claiming she killed two husbands and is described as a psycho. I’ll come back to her in a minute.
The other suspect, to me personally, is Birdy’s nephew. He comes into town suspiciously on the same day that the girl goes missing. He becomes best friends with the “Black Widow’s” son pretty quickly. And he makes a lot of creepy comments to his forensic examiner aunt about chopping people up.
But it ends up not being the two characters above either. In the end, it is the Black Widow’s daughter who murdered the girl. Supposedly, she killed her own stepfather and this teenager. Then she convinced her brother, who was pretty much in love with the girl, to stuff her into a garbage bag and dump her in the woods.
This was so annoying for me! I was very upset. For one, the supposedly psycho teenager was not a fleshed-out character like the rest. We are supposed to believe that she takes after her mother and just enjoys hurting people, without any reason, because she is disturbed. As a reader, we have no sympathy for her at all.
But we are expected to have sympathy for her brother, just one year younger than her, who helped MURDER his own girlfriend and then does the heavy lifting to hide the body in the woods. They suffocate the girl with a bean bag chair, and I imagine this is something that would take some time. The boy is said to have held down the girl so his sister could murder her. This wasn’t an emotional, “Oops! I killed her and didn’t mean to!” situation. It was intentional and it took effort. He also had to carry her body in a garbage bag for a long time to dump the body, which takes a lot of effort. In fact, without the brother’s help, the sister would not have been able to execute the murder in this manner at all. BUT as a reader, we are supposed to be sympathetic to this boy who has a heart of gold and be relieved that he doesn’t get as harsh of a prison sentence.
I’m sorry, what? This boy put in a disgusting amount of effort. And for what? To please his sister? Because she told him to? This boy is never described as having been abused by his mother or sister and he’s bigger and stronger than both of them combined. There is a lot of choice involved here. If the author had built up how much he had been manipulated or given us any reason to be sympathetic for him other than that he didn’t come up with the idea to murder her himself and did it anyway.
We are also given reason to be sympathetic to the victim’s mother. Her back story is that when the victim was a baby, her toddler daughter and husband and she were in a car accident. The two-year-old and the husband die and the baby and the mom survive. This is obviously traumatic and leaves the mother with a severe hoarding problem. At one point, she confesses to Birdy that she is responsible for the car accident. That she was fighting with her husband and caused the crash, possibly by grabbing the steering wheel. Again, I feel no sympathy for this character. She manipulates everyone around her into feeling sorry for her because her husband and baby were taken from her. But she kind of took them from herself?
She is not described to have any kind of postpartum psychosis or something that might have given reason to why she behaved this way. It is basically said that she just got angry and chose to crash the car. So, to me, she reads like a loose cannon. From a mother’s perspective, what could possibly have been so important it was worth killing your husband and toddler over? Supposedly some fight she doesn’t even remember what it was about.
So, those were really my biggest issues with the book. The characters were all believable but the motivations weren’t there. I didn’t feel like I should feel sympathy for the characters that Olsen intended for us to. I didn’t give this book a poor star rating because of it though because I obviously was so sucked into this book that I was able to think through these motivations. My frustration comes from feeling like I knew the characters and felt betrayed when they acted inconsistently. If the characters or the plot were poorly written, I wouldn’t feel so invested in the story.
Taking all of this into consideration, I give this book four out of five stars. It is absolutely worth the read and I will probably read more books from Olsen in the future. However, I did stew about this book for a few days afterward, so I don’t feel as positively about it as I did “If You Tell.”
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