Tana French is an American-Irish writer, dubbed the First Lady of Irish crime fiction by The Independent. The Secret Place, her fifth novel, published in 2014, takes place almost entirely in St. Kilda, a secondary private all-girls’ school in Dublin, where a sixteen year old boy from a nearby school had been found murdered on the grounds the year before. His killer was never identified, and the investigation has gone dormant. In the opening chapter, Detective Stephen Moran, stuck in Dublin’s Cold Case unit, is visited by a schoolgirl, who rooms at St. Kilda’s, bringing him a note she claims to have found posted on a student bulletin board (nicknamed The Secret Place) which reads, “I know who killed him.” Moran, seeing this as an opportunity to work on an active murder case, takes the note to the detective originally assigned to investigate the murder, Antoinette Conway.

The pairing of Moran and Conway makes for delightful reading. When the two of them visit the school that same day to try to identify the author of this note, they seem an ill-matched pair. She is gruff, cold and unlikable, while he is kindly and empathic as they conduct interviews with schoolgirls there. Though a trope in crime fiction, their separate roles as bad cop/good cop is the best part of this novel. They quickly narrow down the investigation to two cliques boarding together at the school. While French tries hard to capture the conversations and personalities of these young women, her heavy use of their slang feels overblown after a time. I was especially put off when she introduced magical realism into the plot to explain the bonds between the cliques. It struck me as far-fetched and quite unnecessary to carry the plot forward.

The day-long investigation on the school grounds is seen through the eyes of Detective Moran. Its interspersed flashbacks are narrated by a number of the different schoolgirls who were possibly involved with the murder victim. This novel is by no means a fast read, but to her credit, French takes the effort to create complex characters and to craft a multilayered story. Despite my reservations on some of the aspects of the novel, it kept my interest throughout. I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if French again pairs Moran and Conway in another crime mystery. ( )

Here’s how I imagine it went down:

French and her besties are at their high school reunion weekend. They’re sitting around drinking wine and reminiscing when someone decides to pull out the old ouija board from the attic storage. Much to their surprise, they channel [a:Agatha Christie|123715|Agatha Christie|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1589991473p2/123715.jpg]’s voice from [b:Cat Among the Pigeons|16342|Cat Among the Pigeons (Hercule Poirot, #36)|Agatha Christie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1275665326l/16342._SY75_.jpg|2728434] Flush with success, they try again, and discover [a:Ray Bradbury|1630|Ray Bradbury|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1445955959p2/1630.jpg]’s [b:Something Wicked This Way Comes|248596|Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2)|Ray Bradbury|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1409596011l/248596._SY75_.jpg|1183550] ( my review).

Alright; maybe I just have my own upcoming reunion on my mind. But I was captivated by the way The Secret Place integrated the turbulent days of youth at a girls’ boarding school with a murder investigation by Dublin’s finest, proving again that French has talent in spades. If there is one thing her prior four books in the Murder Squad series have made clear, French is great at character creation. And atmosphere. Oh, and dialogue. Okay, fine; she’s good at all the components that make a book enjoyable. This time she’s also nailed the police procedural aspects of the case.

The story begins with Holly and her three friends hanging at a playground, musing on the end of summer and their upcoming year together at boarding school. Fast forward to Detective Stephen Moran at the Cold Cases Unit. Holly appears at the police station requesting a meeting with him, six years after when they last met in events covered by The Faithful Place. The exclusive boarding school she resides at has a noticeboard where students can put up anonymous confessions. Holly has found a postcard with an old picture of murder victim Chris Harper. The words “I know who killed him” are pasted across in cut-out letters. Moran seizes the opportunity to wedge his foot in the door of the Murder Squad, and personally takes the note to the case’s lead detective, Antoinette Conway. As she is currently without a partner, he offers her the benefit of his disarming interview skills when she returns to the school to re-interview the students. What follows is an exploration of what led to the death and how the detectives retroactively piece the story together.

The plot timeline is unusual, as it combines the current investigation with viewpoints from the girls and from Chris during the prior year. The investigation takes place within one incredibly busy day, while the events in the girls’ lives cover the entire previous year at school. It’s an interesting kind of time shifting for a murder mystery, but I came to enjoy it. Instead of learning about the prior relationships and circumstances through flashbacks, we live it with four of the girls and the victim, bringing a heightened sense of doom to their daily lives.

Characterization is stellar. The introduction to Murder Squad Detective Conway:

“Antoinette Conway came in with a handful of paper, slammed the door with her elbow. Headed for her desk. Still that stride, keep up or fuck off… Just crossing that squad room, she said You want to make something of it? half a dozen ways.“

Or the (re-) introduction of Detective Frank Mackey:

“I know Holly’s da, a bit. Frank Mackey, Undercover. You go at him straight, he’ll dodge and come in sideways; you go at him sideways, he’ll charge head down.“

Marvelous, really; contrast that with the books that focus on the appearance of the character first, or contain long soliloquies where the character helpfully identifies their history and preferences. In the prior examples, French distills two very different personalities into brief thoughts, so that when we finally meet them, dialogue can be focused and snappy, but still shaded with the layers of meaning from knowing the character. It is a beautiful technique that mirrors real life; if you follow me through my day, I don’t muse on each person interact with; rather, our interactions are defined partially by our history and word choice describing it would reflect it. French’s writing captures that shading without huge, potentially distracting expository swathes.

One of the aspects I enjoyed most was the delicate balance between Moran and Conway. As her fierce personality is evident from the start, I was fascinated by Conway’s attempt to develop a working relationship with her. Initially, Moran is ingratiating himself out of expedience, but it becomes clear Conway understands his intentions. French does a nice job of keeping both Moran and the reader off-balance, guessing at what Conway thinks while having a sense of where it is going.

The setting is immersive, bringing back memories of adolescence in all its insecurities:

“Two years on, though, Becca still hates the Court. She hates the way you’re watched every second from every angle, eyes swarming over you like bugs, digging and gnawing, always a clutch of girls checking out your top or a huddle of guys checking out your whatever. No one ever stays still, at the Court, everyone’s constantly twisting and head-flicking, watching for the watchers, trying for the coolest pose.“

and glories:

“Darkness, and a million stars, and silence. The silence is too big for any of them to burst, so they don’t talk. They lie on the grass and feel their own moving breath and blood… Selena was right: this is nothing like the thrill of necking vodka or taking the piss out of Sister Ignatius… This is nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.“

It is worth noting for those who are new to French that while The Dublin Murder Squad is nominally a series, the connection is through the web of relationships in the police department. Each story tends to focus on a particular member of the squad and their emotional entanglement to the case at hand. Although they may reference events in a prior story, they usually aren’t spoilerish, nor is reading them in order needful. In this case, French seems to draw back from a detective’s emotional dissolution and instead focus on a more positive resolution.

I found The Secret Place to be a complex, satisfying story, delicately balanced between mystery and character story. There was no part that I was even considered skimming, as the flashbacks held as much interest as the police procedural. In fact, reviewing was a challenge, as I kept thumbing through my notes, tempted by my saved passages to re-read. Though I read an advance copy, I suspect this is one I’ll have to add to the paper library.


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Many thanks to NetGalley and Viking for providing me an advance copy to review. Quotes are taken from a galley copy and are subject to change in the published edition. Still, I think it gives a flavor of the evocative writing. ( )

Not my favorite book in the series. ( )

What an amazing story. It took me a chapter or two to slide right back in to this world. It feels like I've been gone forever. But then it was.....perfect.

I remember this guy. It took me about a hundred pages for me to let go of my anger at him! ha! it was tough, to try to remember a reason to like this guy - I disliked him so much in the last book

but this one is, again, sheer genius. Don't stop writing [a:Tana French|138825|Tana French|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1277505771p2/138825.jpg]

I would LOVE another installment! or anything you want to write! ( )

Perhaps it's because I read this with the first book from the series relatively fresh in mind but this just couldn't live up to In The Woods. By the time it became a kind of laborious chore reading and I constantly marked the pages I'd read, turning back to see my progress, I knew it was time to call it quits. ( )

Tana French sets the main action of The Secret Place, the fifth installment in her wildly successful Dublin Murder Squad series, in St. Kilda’s, a posh boarding school for the daughters of Ireland’s well-heeled and well-connected. The plot revolves around an unsolved murder. A year ago, the body of Chris Harper, a student from Colm’s, a neighbouring boarding school for boys, was found on the grounds of St. Kilda’s with his head bashed in. A year later, St. Kilda’s student Holly Mackey contacts Detective Stephen Moran of the Dublin Cold-Case unit with a clue. She’s discovered a card posted to the “secret place,” a bulletin board in her school where students can post anonymous notices revealing their troubles and complaints without fear of retribution. The card that Holly’s found includes a photo of Chris with the words “I know who killed him” glued across his image in typeface cut from a printed source, a book or newspaper. Moran, who’s been harbouring secret career ambitions, sees this as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the Murder Squad. Immediately, he alerts Detective Antoinette Conway to Holly’s discovery. Conway served as lead on the initial investigation into Chris’s death, and though she usually works solo, she takes Moran with her to St. Kilda’s to help her revive the investigation. French’s detailed narrative follows two distinct threads. In the contemporary story, Moran and Conway dig into the circumstances behind the brutal and bloody killing, reviewing old theories, re-interviewing witnesses, re-hashing and questioning the line of inquiry that left Conway without a viable suspect a year ago. A second thread delves into a deeper past to follow the actions of two groups of St. Kilda’s students, one quartet led by Holly and a rival foursome led by Joanne Heffernan, over a period covering the last months of Chris Harper’s life. The novel takes place over a single day, with Conway and Moran slowly breaking down the intricate wall of lies, misdirection and misinformation that Holly and Joanne and their friends have erected to protect themselves from the police and from each other. At a crucial point, a complication arises when the questioning grows intense and Holly’s father, Detective Frank Mackey (the main character from French’s earlier novel, The Faithful Place), arrives on the scene to make sure his daughter is not being coerced. French spins a twisted tale of teenage malice and deception. Each of the girls has her own reasons for concealing the truth, and the author spends much of the novel in the company of these teenagers, who are tortured by questions, mostly of a romantic nature, which revolve around which of the girls Chris Harper might have been involved with. It is during these passages that the narrative sags a bit under the weight of excessive detail. Still, though a bit overlong, The Secret Place, is a worthy addition to a stellar series and benefits greatly from Tana French’s trademark psychological depth, sturdy plotting and atmospheric prose. ( )

Last year a boy was murdered on the grounds of St Kilda’s boarding school. Now someone has left a note that says “I know who killed him”.
Investigator Antoinette Conway, who’s something of an outsider on the Dublin Murder Squad, enlists Stephen Moran, a young officer to help interview two groups of four friends, boarders at the school. He’d talked with one of the girls on a previous case and established a rapport, and he sees this as a chance to leave Cold Cases to join the Murder Squad. The interviews take place over the course of a long day, and these chapters alternate with accounts from the girls’ point of view of what was going on before the murder happened. Rivalries between the two cliques, sneaking out at night, flirtations, secrets. The four friends who are the main characters are fiercely loyal to each other.
The theme of belonging, groups, being in or out - those are issues for the two detectives, too.
I was interested in the girls’ friendships; I never had a friend group or even a friendship like that so some of it seemed hard to believe and I didn’t understand some of their motivations. But it’s a good solid mystery that was hard to put down.
One false note was some magical elements that neither made sense nor added anything. I wasn’t as annoyed by the teenage girl dialog stuff as other Goodreads reviewers.
TBH it’s been a while since I read Faithful Place and I didn’t remember Officer Mackey or Holly. So I was kind of waiting for a reveal of “that time we talked before” that might or might not relate to the current mystery.
I’m a big fan of Tana French and while this wasn’t her best, it wasn’t disappointing.
I feel like I need to reread this and look for things I missed. Looking forward to this. ( )

The parts of the girls' lives really got the pace out of the novel. I felt it was totally unnecessary and have the idea that the writer added them to make the book as long as the other books. For me the power of the series is that you follow one of the members of the murder squad and see everything through his or her eyes. ( )

Another great mystery from Tana French. She kept me guessing until the end. I gave a lower rating because she replicated how teenage girls think and talk. It got annoying after a while but maybe that was the point. ( )

I enjoyed the book, in general. If it wasn’t for the over the top teenagers I’d have rated the book a solid 4. ( )

Good but a little confusing. ( )

*** SPOILER ALERT******

This is my second book by Tana French......I read The Woods not long ago. I hadn't planned to read any more books in this series, but found this one in my stash....decided to give it another go.

Why? Why did I plan to abandon the series after one book.....although I really love French's writing style and storylines? The Woods absolutely ticked me off....the beginning storyline in the synopsis...the one that started it all...was left opened at the end.....I hate ambiguous endings!

While this book does end with closure.....I noticed another pattern in this series.....completely unexplained paranormal/ supernatural elements......both books contain these elements with absolutely no explanation.

Will there be some type of explanation later in the series? Is it all leading to something? I'm willing to try a few more books to find out. ( )

My brain often wrestles with the wonder of letters. How twenty-six letters arranged into words. Turned into paragraphs. Filling up pages. Occupying our brain. How these letters turn into wonder. How the magicians who wield them can make them dance and weave. Do their bidding and inject into us all sorts of emotions. Push us to places we would not go on our own. Poison us with thoughts and plots and people.

Tana French is a magician. She is everything I love about fiction. She hooks me into a style of storytelling that I am not always a fan of. Fiction is fickle. We all are not going to like the same thing. French often tells a story like the eating of an artichoke. You pull off the outer pieces and you eat them. They are not always completely done. Some of those outer pieces are rough but you keep digging. Piece by piece you pull off the leaves and consume them. The deeper you get into the artichoke, the better it is. The flavor expands. Your tastes buds are tickled. Than you get to the heart of it. All the prickly artichoke thorns out of the way you are presented with the fur. You know underneath it is the prize. So you carefully scrape the choke off. Then all your work is paid for with the delicious finish line.

French takes her time. I don’t always like this. Pacing is a tricky thing but all her books have this trait in common. They pick up steam and barrel to the finish line. This book was no exception. Unsurprisingly, I loved it. There always comes a point in all French books where it becomes almost impossible to put it down. You just can’t wait to see how she gets to the heart of it. She is an expert plotter and her characters are always engaging.

I don’t like to talk too much about plot because that is for you to discover. So here is my bare minimum. Young friends at a boarding school suspect that one of their own is guilty of a murder that took place a year ago. Unable to live with it any longer one of them tosses out a fishing line to hook the police back into the investigation. The story than is told through two alternating plot lines. The police investigation and the girl’s viewpoints months before the murder.

All of French’s books are stand-alone books which take place in a shared world with characters over lapping. This one is no different. While you can read it without reading any of the earlier books I would not recommend it. I think you would lose a little of the tension. So if you are fan of the series, what are you waiting for? Go read it. If you have never picked one up then head out and grab a copy of In The Woods and enjoy the ride.
( )

I almost gave up on this book when I realized that there was magic. It seemed like cheating -- I loved [b:Broken Harbor|13123877|Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad, #4)|Tana French|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1330675374s/13123877.jpg|15718578] for its grittiness and realness and I was worried that would be lost in The Secret Place. But it turned out that for me, the key to really getting Tana French books was embracing the magical realism here. The mental gymnastics I had to do to reach a place where magical realism was okay for me in her books led me to realize that there's a flavor of magical realism in all her books. Not literally, of course, but her books are to traditional murder mysteries the way that magical realism is to traditional fantasy: they aren't about murder, they use crimes as a lens to reflect upon the traits in real life that are difficult to explore in pure "literary" fiction.

And in that context, French is a genius. The Secret Place uses its central mystery to explore the tight friendships of teenage years, and how empowering and close they can be. The four main characters are depicted perfectly, achingly nuanced -- almost like someone that I've known and drifted away from myself. The overall effect was one of extreme, almost overwhelming nostalgia, so much so that the ( )

This was brilliant. So many angles of a story all swirling around and through each other. Back and forth in time lines, baddies, goodies...but who is a baddie or a goodie when it's all said and done?

My favourite thing about French's books is the interactions of her characters. You can see their facial expressions and hear the exhalation of breath from them when they are caught off guard, see every side glance. She sticks you right in the middle of everything and then, God help you. ( )

Just read it. Tana French is an awesome writer, all of her books leave you guessing until the last chapter. That's all I can say. Read it. ( )

So I have just finished French's The Secret Place. So much of a fan. (Starting to wonder, am I a fan because it so different than north american authors?)

First let me say the two small things I did not like. 1 - My love of characters. Antoinette bugged me. Like on all levels. And yes, I said "like". Probably because for half of this book you are immersed in the world of teenagers with brains that glitch out on proper words. Because Antoinette is a main character and she bothered me - reading was sometimes hard and I must have told her to shut up 100 times. But she apparently did not bother me enough because I sped through this story. 2 - The flipping back and forth from present to past ... there were times that the only reason I knew I was in the past was the sentence "...Chris Harper had 5 months and 3 weeks to live..." or variations of that - so I knew of course since Chris Harper was the dead guy that we were in the past. I actually wonder if it is because I was reading an digital copy and there are missing page breaks of titles? Oh well.

What I loved, in brief. The landscape of this book is vivid. Basically, you have teenagers and boarding school, and that could have made for a horrid book (for me anyway, I cannot read YA), especially since the adults, Antoinette and Stephen feel like peripheral characters. They have more a shepherding role - they guide and herd the story along. Its an interesting feeling - for me it was like I was on the sidelines watching - mostly because the story is half told by Holly and her friends - and I never could get into YA. That being said, it was not a bad feeling - it was different and interesting. For me this is a testament to French's skill as a writer. The storyline here is so different than that of her other books, which is something I love about her - each book is about a character found in the previous book, and she does such a great job of character development that you feel like you know that character by the end of the book. Then, if you see them in another book its like seeing an old friend.

Tana French is well worth a read. ( )

This one was very...subtle. Gently pieced together from lots and lots of teenage girls' activities. Didn't know what was the point of all the electric lights and levitation stuff. Not as gripping as some of her other books. ( )

This was a pretty enjoyable book, but a little confusing to me at times. There were a lot of characters that were hard to keep straight because they were so similar - a bunch of teenagers at high-priced boarding schools. The chapters alternated with the present and the past, with the past from the point of view of some of the girls, and the present of the detectives investigating a murder. The past caught up in the end and wrapped things up neatly. I enjoyed this part where the young girls begin to realize that they are not going to have their ideal life forever. One girl gets to see her mother as a student at the same school, and she realizes that her mother was just like her and her friends, but turned out much different than she had expected, the moral being that what you will become is not fixed, and may change in ways you never expect.

Edit
With the overload from all the teen girls, I forgot to mention anything about the other half of the story, the detectives. Thanks to Nataliya for reminding me. There were mainly three - the primary team of Moran and Conway, and one from an earlier book named Frank Mackey, who played a more minor role but was often there even when not present.

Detective Stephen Moran was stuck investigating cold cases, which was actually a step up at one time thanks to the help of Frank Mackey. Then, Frank's daughter Holly, who he had interviewed six years earlier for a murder case at her school, came to him to bring him a note from the school's "Secret Place", an anonymous bulletin board. She came to him because he had treated her as a real person previously when most of the investigators tiptoed around trying not to upset the students. The note from some anonymous student said she knew who killed the boy from the old case that was never solved. Detective Moran thought this might be a chance to move up to the Murder Squad, so he decided to deliver the note to them and try to get involved in the case. The lead detective in that case was one Antoinette Conway, who worked alone mainly because she wasn't "one of the boys", after strongly objecting to one of the men getting too friendly with his hands. In that group, you either were one of the boys, or you were an outsider. But Moran didn't care about that, and he talked his way into working with her. She had a chip on her shoulder, but he didn't care, he just wanted to work on the case and solve it. Their relationship straddled the line between friend and foe, which kept things interesting. I liked both of them, although a lot of reviewers didn't seem to agree.

Frank Mackey played a big part late in the book, being Holley's father. He mainly played the part of being a catalyst, and he was an interesting character in the story.

Oh, and I learned the Irish equivalent of the southern term y'all for the plural version of "you". They seem to use "yous". I've never noticed this term used before. Guess it makes sense, though. ( )

This is tied with The Searcher as my least favorite Tana French book so far. The writing is wonderful, as usual, but I just don't care about the teenage drama here. Yes, I've read teenage dramas before and thought they were brilliant, but this one just missed the mark somehow for me. I don't buy that the murderer is who the murderer is, and the motive doesn't make much sense. Yes, I understand the intensity of teenage friendships and how it is somehow a different world from the "real" adult world, but it just felt off here. Also, if you're going to put a teen romance at the heart of it, it should be an intense, well-written romance that the reader believes. The one here was just....flat. Moreover, I didn't get enough taste of Stephen as a character. In the other novels, we get a good sense of the detective's story. ( )

While the read date indicates 2018, I read this every year.
I appear to be reading the Dublin Murder Squad series backwards. I read this because Detective Conway was in it, and I was curious to learn more about Detective Moran.
Two not-exactly-bad things about this book: part of it drags at times. Some of the prose is purple.
Onward.
Detective Conway is who I wish I could be 90% of the time. Detective Moran is a whoooole lot closer to who I am. It's an interesting...thing. There's a word, but I can't think of it.
Detective Moran spends a lot of time in his head, mulling over things and describing them in purple-prose ways. I was fascinated by this, as I do the same but without the purple prose. The word choices -work- in the book. It's -amazing.- And to have the teenage girls' POVs be how they are--it's like puzzle pieces that are expertly fitted to create a picture you have to look at twice to appreciate fully. Reading this book brought me right back to high school (ugh), and I was -very- unhappy when, at times, it brought me back to -middle- school. Applause for the author for being such a skilled writer. I was -glad- when the book dragged because it meant I could catch my breath and my head felt less like it would explode. The story wasn't predictable, not really. I was so interested to learn who the murderer was, and was surprised. I had it narrowed down to two people and was wrong. I liked that.

I loved seeing the work-relationship develop between Conway and Moran. I was cheering for the two of them the entire time, and recognized themes that are also present in the next book. Moran sounded like he had a little bit of a crush on Conway, and I'm so glad it wasn't explored. Strong friendships at work are so much better for everyone. Not to mention Conway would -not- be flattered if she knew (she probably does). Mostly though, Moran's clear admiration for Conway was there. What a delight. It was made all the more interesting a writing choice because Moran wanted so badly to be alongside another male detective who was a higher social class than he was. I decided that meant a certain thing and appreciate the diversity. However, that is my headcanon and what is also equally likely: Moran wanted to live vicariously through a person who is wealthy and has good breeding. He didn't get a person like that; instead, he got a woman who has a background somewhat similar to his own. I cheer this choice. I am so, so glad the two are set up to work together the way they are, and so eager to hopefully see more of them.

And, not-spoiler: people who have read the book wonder about the possibility of a particular supernatural event. I say no, that the teens were doing it to scare the others, or at times because they were so frightened that they could scream anyway, and that Conway used that to her advantage in questioning them. I feel so bad for laughing when she did that, but hahaha. ( )

very good mystery audio book - i like how she shows you the story from the good guys and bad guys side. Second audiobook of hers I have listened too - they are well done and keep my interest. I will listen to more. ( )

Two Irish detectives are visited by a teen girl with a new clue from a yr long unsolved murder: a boy from the nearby boys' prep school was found dead in a secret glade on the grounds of the all girls boarding school. And thus the story launches, moving back in time to the year past, via multiple narrators & then coming back to the present, via the viewpt of the young detective. Really interesting insights - at times - in the character's thoughts, motivations. I had to stop sometimes and re-read her lines, they were so striking. And while the teens' internal thoughts, conversations, were sometimes uncomfortably cruel or manipulative, sometimes poignant and heartbreaking - yeah, she captured the teen girl mindset for sure. I do agree with other reader commentators - it was a bit long, & the back & forth became a bit wearisome. ( )

Book goes back and forth which can be a bit confusing Love the zingers the girls throw at each other ( )

I didn't like this one as much as The Trespasser by French. Some of the teen girls seemed to be more caricatures. Seeing the first time Conway and Moran work together was helpful. Unsure why there was a bit of paranormal included. ( )