Every clue leads back to these two groups. They interview the girls, including Holly’s group of four friends and a rival clique. Kilda’s for the day in order to investigate who sent the card and who murdered Chris Harper. Stephen brings the card to Detective Antoinette Conway, known as a humorless ballbuster by the other officers on the Murder Squad, whose earlier investigation came up empty-handed. Kilda’s can pin up secrets anonymously to let off steam. The card was pinned up at “The Secret Place”, a noticeboard where the girls of St. When 16-year-old Holly Mackey brings him a photo of Chris Harper with a caption that says “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM”, the detective sees his opportunity to join Dublin’s Murder Squad. All of the girls claimed they knew nothing-not why Chris was on the grounds of the girls’ school that night or who killed him.ĭetective Stephan Moran has been working Cold Cases. The Dublin Murder Squad investigated the case, but it was closed for a year without being solved. In the novel, a handsome teenage boy, Chris Harper, was murdered a year ago on the grounds of St. The Secret Place is no exception, and here, too, French’s poetic tendencies return.Ī car has the top down “to dragnet all the sunshine it can get, in the sudden explosion of summer that could be gone tomorrow” and one of the girls makes “a gritted noise of pure fury, hands starfished rigid.” But the poetic flourishes are less nostalgic, and instead suit an atmosphere of dark teenage secrecy. Perhaps because of her acting background, French has a knack for creating layered, multi-dimensional characters and distinctive voices that make each of her novels an event. French abandoned the poetry in favor of slower character studies and more empirical observations. The lead characters of Faithful Place and Broken Harbor are more hardboiled, experienced detectives and their voices reflect that. The lead characters were good at their jobs, but young. Although they were suspenseful procedurals, they also tapped into nostalgia and childhood wounds.

The first two novels, In the Woods and The Likeness, were noteworthy for their memorably poetic style. In all her novels, French is interested in unraveling the mysteries of how the past makes us. Like her four other Dublin Murder Squad books, The Secret Place is brilliantly plotted with twists and turns, but also like the other books, the real reason to read it is its uncanny way of plumbing the darkest depths of the human soul. Following in the footsteps of ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars and Megan Abbott’s The Fever, Tana French mines the dangerous, beautiful territory of teenage girls-their secrets and their blind loyalty-in her latest novel, The Secret Place.

The secret place book