The Secret Place

I was impressed by all her past works I've read, the quality of the language, the tension buildup.

In this one the ravings of a bunch of teenage, rich teenage girls with sentences such as "it as like, ewww, I don't know". So you could say that the ambience is well recreated but it sure makes for a long a boring read. At about 25% I went to read other reviews who all said it didn't get better until the end so I have to admit I left it at that.

This is another excellent installment of The Dublin Murder Squad series, in which we see Frank Mackey from a different angle, and the the younger Stephen Moran a few years later. This mystery also concerns Frank's daughter Holly,, but in a different way.

Tana French's characters and back stories keep me coming back to her series. Interesting Irish expressions and good dialogue are also a plus in this page-turner of a mystery.

Enjoy!

Any order you take these in, they reverberate and resolve so nicely. And the prose is golden, even with the annoyingly accurate, catty teen speech in some chapters of the story. I'll be haunted for a long time by the incidents in the year of these girls and these detectives.

Took me a while to get into this book. The first quarter or so of it was taken up by a series of back-to-back interviews with flashbacks interspersed, which I found tedious and not very interesting. Not really sure why. Was it that the entire thing seemed to revolve around boarding school girl politics?Did pick up afterwards, though, and by the end, can't say I didn't enjoy it. I have yet to find a book in the series I enjoyed as much as the first, In the Woods, which I thought was close to perfect..

Reviewed in Reviewing the Evidence. Intense, beautifully written, overlong book with tricky (but effective) narration and a fascinating take on the pressures adolescent girls face to perform a certain kind of sexuality.