Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of a popular boy whose body was found at a girls’ boarding school a year earlier. The photo had been posted at “The Secret Place,” the school’s anonymous gossip board, and the caption says “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.” Stephen joins with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case—beneath the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. With the clues leading back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, to their rival clique, and to the tangle of relationships that bound them all to the murdered boy, the private underworld of teenage girls turns out to be more mysterious and more dangerous than the detectives imagined.
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.
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..
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" …
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
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.
