Name: Stephanie Rich's review of The Secret Place by Tana French
Item: The Secret Place
Rating: 4
Author: Stephanie Rich

Tana French

The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago. The caption says, 'I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM'. Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's sixteen and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story. Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets. The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card. Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get that solved, he will have to work with Detective Antoinette Conway - tough, prickly, an outsider, everything Stephen doesn't want in a partner. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly and her three closest friends inhabit and disentangle the truth from their knot of secrets, even as he starts to suspect that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear.

The Secret Place

Stephanie Rich

This is an outstanding addition to the Dublin Murder Squad series.  The focus is on a murder that occurred on the grounds of an elite boarding school for girls.  The person who was murdered was a student at the similar boarding school for boys a few blocks away.  The detectives were characters I wanted to root for, and the characterization of the students was careful and individualized.  The story is told by alternating descriptions of events in the past and during the current day, with the past events speeding toward the murder and the current day events showing the detectives working to unravel a tangled skein of deceit and half-truths on the part of the students involved.  This is a do or die solve for the detectives--one detective is the lead on the case, who has not solved it a year later, and the other detective is from the cold case squad who desperately wants to move into the elite Murder Squad.  I thought I had this one unraveled, but one last twist surprised me at the end.

shellybn

“An absolutely mesmerizing read. . . . Tana French is simply this: a truly great writer.” —Gillian Flynn Read the New York Times bestseller by Tana French, author of the forthcoming novel The Searcher and “the most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years” (The Washington Post). A year ago a boy was found murdered at a girlsʼ boarding school, and the case was never solved. 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 the boy with the caption: “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.

A Novel

Lara Engle

The Secret Place wasn't my favorite of this series. I'd rank it second from the bottom, just above Broken Harbor. But even my second least favorite Dublin Murder Squad book is pretty dang good. The structure of this one is interesting and satisfying, but it also makes it feel way too long. The entire book is one day, with alternating chapters flashing back to events a year earlier. These flashbacks cover a period of six months, then fast-forward through to meet back up with the beginning of the long day. The chapters covering the long day feel like they're in real time, making it drag along. Plus, neither detective in this book is very likeable or relatable for me. The girls at the boarding school are accurately rendered, but as a high school teacher, I see enough of teenagers being teenagers. As always, the best parts of a Tana French book are her lyrical language and bittersweet reminiscences. We see that nothing lasts forever, yet memories and friendship are eternal. I'll be sad to see this series end. It has become a friend, as well.

'A gripping read for those still pining for GONE GIRL' Elle's top five beach reads The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago. The caption says, 'I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM'. Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's sixteen and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story. Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets. The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card. Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get it solved, he will have to work with Detective Antoinette Conway - tough, prickly, an outsider, everything Stephen doesn't want in a partner. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly and her three closest friends inhabit and disentangle the truth from their knot of secrets, even as he starts to suspect that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear. From the multi-award-winning author of Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller In the Woods, The Secret Place is a searing novel of psychological suspense.

Dublin Murder Squad: 5

Zoey Mikalatos

Amazing - somehow Tana French always manages to come up with something new, even with her fifth murder mystery set in the same town. I love the way that she moves through different narrators, and how everything feels unfamiliar each book. 

"When you stop being a kid, you lose your one chance at that too-tender-to-touch gold, that breathtaken everything and forever. Once you start growing up and getting sense, the outside world turns real, and your own private world is never everything again."

Picks up in the end but takes a long time to get there.
Not bad but not her best.

Melody Izard

One of my favorite things about Tana French is her lack of predictability. I love the way her books avoid formula. 

A friend mentioned to me that this book seemed formulaic and I brushed it off as a comment with no substance.

But as soon as I started reading this I saw exactly what she meant. 

The same mood. A big divide between those who come from one side of the tracks and the other. Boarding school. A past mystery in a key players life. 

OK. There is the bad. But still. Oh how I love Tana French.

Those moody teenagers. Those sly, complicated detectives. She is really a master at leading all these pieces over the plot board.

Maria

Nichola Inglis

While I wasn't struck on this book at first, after the first few chapters I became completely absorbed in the story. The thing that bothered me at first was the changing narrative between the Detective and the school girls however once the story began to take shape I enjoyed how much more informed this allowed the reader to be. I loved the fact that the detective's chapters were set over the space of a day while the school girls' covered a number of years - I felt this gave a deeper insight into the story, as well as the mindsets of all the potential killers.

The book kept me guessing up until the very end with the questions of who killed Chris, and who posted the note in the Secret Place. Perhaps I was blind, but I never seen the killer being who it was!

Overall, I loved The Secret Place. It was the first Tana French book I've read and since having finished it I've gone back and read the previous four books in the Dublin Murder Squad series. French is a fantastic author and this book makes for a great stand-alone book as well as part of a series.

Laura

So now I'm all caught up with the Dublin Murder Squad. Not quite sure how to feel about it. On one hand, I'm relieved- as much as I enjoyed these "behemoths" (they may be only 400 pages, but they feel like 600)- I'm glad I don't have to put aside a week in June to get through one. On the other, I'm sad that I have to wait for 2018 (I think she publishes every two years) to get the next Dublin Murder Squad book. She just has such wonderful ideas and characters and I can't wait to see what she comes up with next. And who's going to narrate- I'm thinking maybe Breslin from The Trespasser, since he kind acted like Kennedy did in Faithful Place, though I'm hoping for O'Kelly. I would say Fleas might also be an option, but he's a bit too much like Mackey. But who the hell knows?

Also, after reading one of her books I find myself using the same phrases as her characters. Fuck me, the spit of you, bleeding, etc, I just use it all. It's pretty funny actually.

This book was different from her typical Dublin Murder Squad books. But, in my opinion, it was different in a better way than Faithful Place was. Like, it only took place over the course of a day, maybe two. And interestingly, it was told in a kind of dual narration, half of it being first person with the spotlight being on Det Stephen Moran, the other half being third person focusing on the main four girls who were suspects in the case. And, believe it or not, it was successful. 

Of course, the first time it was a bit jarring, given that there was no warning about the POV shift, but as the story unfolded it really worked. This probably had a lot to do with the little interest I had in Stephen Moran and the little connection I felt he had to the case. Sure, on the surface it was there, but it wasn't the same connection that Ryan or Maddox or Mackey or Kennedy or, hell, even Conway had to the cases in their respective books. I felt like Moran was her most vanilla narrator yet- he lacked the usual distinctive voice that I've come to expect from French MCs (ironically, that's probably what makes him stand out in her array of main characters), and even his backstory was pretty generic. He reminded me of a watered down Det Sam O'Neill from the first two books (an aside: I always thought Sam was jipped of his own book- would have loved to see him mucking around the countryside he grew up in solving a murder). 

Continue reading this review on my blog here: http://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/20...

Les Reynolds

Enjoyed it all the way through. Her writing is fantastic, the descriptions of the main characters thoughts are so beautiful and evocative. Felt it didn't really need the fantastical/supernatural elements?

Bryan Alexander

This is my third Tana French mystery. My daughter, my brother, and I have been working through the series, very taken by French's combination of plotting, social consciousness, darkness, and lovely writing.

Secret Place concerns a murder at an elite Irish girl's school. Two Dublin Murder Squad detectives spend a long day investigating, each characters appearing in previous books (I haven't read those particular ones yet). French gives us a solid mystery plot, taking us through multiple suspects and several reversals before the final reveal.

But the main strength of the novel is its deep dive into the world of teenage girls. Each suspect is a student at St. Hilda's, embedded in fiercely contested social roles and power struggles. Secret Place takes this world very seriously, giving the complex relationship dynamics time to unfold, allowing each girl their own voice. The latter means an entertaining variety of slang and expressions, which seem to terrify some reviewers. (One nice line: "Holly looked at her as though the thought of all that stupid made her want to sleep for a year.") The friendship between young women is really at the book's heart.

In fact - ah, spoiler time: (view spoiler)[the murder is ultimately about attempts to sustain those friendships in the face of all kinds of pressures, from looming adulthood to jealousies over boys. The killing is really a sacrifice to protect and maintain a small community of young women. That's the most, well, positive murder in all of French's novels that I've read (hide spoiler)].

Secret Place continues some themes and approaches from previous novels in the series. There's the micropolitics of people sorting themselves in Dublin's social pecking order. There's a touch of the occult - here, the magic of a forest, and (view spoiler)[some girls' apparent telekinesis (!), not to mention some hints of myth (three powerful women dispensing cryptic truths) (hide spoiler)]. And the plot is driven by interrogations and other conversations. 

But the novel breaks with French's earlier work in key ways. Neither protagonist detective has a deep personal tie to the murder story. There's isn't much police procedural action: very little departmental maneuvering, no forensics. The novel breaks into two tracks, the present day's investigation and the girls' backstory leading up to the present. On top of that (view spoiler)[the finale differed in key ways. The two detectives actually did well by the case, suffering neither personal nor professional hardship, as is the case in earlier Dublin Murder books. There's also a post-solution coda tracing the girls' lives forward somewhat, which was a good touch (hide spoiler)]. I applaud French's willingness to experiment with what has been a very successful formula.

Ultimately I enjoyed and appreciated the book, yet my admiration started to flag by the last half. Partly and honestly this may be due to my never having been a teenage girl, and not being able to stay in that world for very long. It wore on me over time. But if I can get past that personal perspective, the book became objectively somewhat repetitive, with similar scenes and details reiterated. Moreover, the mystical touches (view spoiler)[didn't work as strongly here as they did in earlier books, like Woods and Broken Harbor. Clearly the girls tapped into some kind of power which led them back to an edenic space, and thus.... what? They misspent their power in murder, or their budding strengths were no match for a world bent on turning them into something else? It's not clear, which leaves the occult bits hanging there in the end.  (hide spoiler)]

I listened to Secret Place as an audiobook, which was a splendid experience. As the book is split into two tracks, so the audio version receives two narrators. Stephen Hogan reads the chapters for detective Moran's voice, while Lara Hutchinson voices the girls' sections. Both Hogan and Hutchinson have gorgeous voices. They both do fine jobs of giving different characters distinct sounds. And each represents their characters beautifully, with Hogan digging into Moran's love of beauty and essential passivity, while Hutchinson marvelously brings out the teens' passion, energy, and fury. It was a pleasure to listen to.

I recommend Secret Place for any mystery reader, regardless of your having read Tana French previously or not at all. And I look forward to the next Dublin Murder Squad outing.

Stephanie Rich &
The Secret Place by Tana French

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