The Secret Place
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By Tana French
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1 review
‘Absolutely mesmerising’ Gillian Flynn, author of Sharp Objects and Gone Girl
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.
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Book 5 in the Dublin Murder Squad series and it's an enjoyable mystery. The action takes place between two very select private schools in Dublin – one for girls, the other for boys. One year earlier the body of a teenage boy had been found in the grounds of the girls’ school but the case remains unsolved. When a photo of the dead boy is pinned on a notice board with the message ‘I know who killed him’ the police reactivate their investigation to see if they can find the person who penned the note. It’s told in two timelines – before the murder and in the new investigation – and is a tale of teen-age duplicity, angst and hormones. The solution to the murder is actually rather mundane but French pitches her teen-aged characters just right.
Review by: Freyja
