de Tana French
The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls’ boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption saysI KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.
Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin’s Murder Squad—and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. “The Secret Place,” a board where the girls at St. Kilda’s School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why.
But everything they discover leads them back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends and their fierce enemies, a rival clique—and to the tangled web of relationships
that bound all the girls to Chris Harper. Every step in their direction turns up the pressure. Antoinette Conway is already suspicious of Stephen’s links to the Mackey family. St. Kilda’s will go a long way to keep murder outside their walls. Holly’s father, Detective Frank Mackey, is circling, ready to pounce if any of the new evidence points toward his daughter. And the private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined.
The Secret Place is a powerful, haunting exploration of friendship and loyalty, and a gripping addition to the Dublin Murder Squad series.
The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls’ boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption saysI KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.
Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin’s Murder Squad—and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. “The Secret Place,” a board where the girls at St. Kilda’s School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why.
But everything they discover leads them back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends and their fierce enemies, a rival clique—and to the tangled web of relationships
that bound all the girls to Chris Harper. Every step in their direction turns up the pressure. Antoinette Conway is already suspicious of Stephen’s links to the Mackey family. St. Kilda’s will go a long way to keep murder outside their walls. Holly’s father, Detective Frank Mackey, is circling, ready to pounce if any of the new evidence points toward his daughter. And the private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined.
The Secret Place is a powerful, haunting exploration of friendship and loyalty, and a gripping addition to the Dublin Murder Squad series.
Critiques-
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November 24, 2014
French’s fifth Dublin Murder Squad entry focuses on Stephen Moran, a smart detective feeling his ambition cool in the cold-cases department. When 16-year-old Holly Mackey, a student at St. Kilda’s exclusive suburban school for girls, presents him with key information on the unsolved murder of a boy from a neighboring academy, he sees this as his ticket back into the city’s elite Murder Squad, where he once apprenticed with Holly’s father, Frank. But first he has to convince the detective assigned to the case—Antoinette Conway, the squad’s ultra-abrasive sole woman—to use him in the investigation. The book consists of Moran’s narration, broken by flashbacks from Holly and her closest schoolmates, recalling a time before the murder. Readers Hogan and Hutchinson, Dubliners as well as skilled performers, present the compelling prose with nuance and lyrical naturalness. Hogan captures Moran’s anxious desire to succeed and the brittle loneliness not quite hidden in Conway’s hard-boiled attitude. Hutchinson’s softer, higher-pitched voice clearly delineates Holly’s flashbacks, moving between a schoolgirl’s sentimentality and the snobbery, anger, and impatience of a temperamental teen. Most of the novel takes place at St. Kilda’s, and it’s a testament to the quality of the prose and the readers that, at 20 hours, it never feels claustrophobic. A Viking hardcover. -
Starred review from July 28, 2014
In French’s mesmerizing fifth Dublin Murder Squad mystery (after 2012’s Broken Harbor), Det. Stephen Moran, who works in the cold-case unit, is biding his time until he can make the Murder Squad. When 16-year-old Holly Mackey, a colleague’s daughter, shows up with a clue to an old crime, Moran sees his chance. A student at St. Kilda’s boarding school, Holly vividly remembers the previous year’s murder of Chris Harper, a popular teen from Colm’s, the neighboring boys’ school. From the St. Kilda’s personal notice board known as the Secret Place, Holly brings Moran a photo of Chris with the words “I know who killed him” pasted across his chest. Moran joins forces with the murder squad’s feisty Det. Antoinette Conway, and the pair visit the school, setting off a chain of events that ensnares Holly and her three best mates. French stealthily spins a web of teenage secrets with a very adult crime at the center. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary, TV & Film Agency. -
In French's new entry in the Dublin Murder Squad series, a visiting teenager is violently murdered at a girls' school. Expert narrators Stephen Hogan, sounding emphatic, focused, authoritarian, and Lara Hutchinson, sounding acerbic and knowing, trade chapters as investigators Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway. The duo deftly explores the nature of teenage friendship and loyalty to uncover the killer after a simple note appears that says, "I know who killed him." Fans of the bestselling French find able partners in bringing the world of teen angst to life as Hogan and Hutchinson use their honed voices to maintain the tension all the way to the revelation of the killer. R.O. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
