The Secret Place
By Tana French
Two Stars
Read September 2014
A year after the unsolved murder of a rich and handsome prep school boy whose body was found on the grounds of a nearby exclusive girl’s school, a card with his photo and the words “I know who killed him” is posted on a bulletin board at the girl’s school. The post reignites the stalled case, teaming detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway. He’s hoping his work on the case will elevate him from cold cases to murder squad, and she’s hoping to finally solve the failed first case where she was lead detective. They’re both working class Dubs who have very different reactions to St. Kilda’s — he’s charmed by its elite beauty and she resents its old school privilege. The suspects are two quartets of girls, one led by a classic Queen Bee whose followers fear her anger and retribution and the other a foursome of genuine and somewhat quirky friends. Of course, the quartets despise each other individually and collectively a la mean girls. The novel intercuts now and then stories, with the now covering the intensive one-day investigation that leads to a solve and the then story covering the school years before and after the murder. Although I am a big fan of Tana French and enjoyed all her earlier novels, especially the incomparable Faithful Place, The Secret Place just didn’t work for me for a couple of reasons. First, I wasn’t very interested in the teen suspects and their mean-girl subtext, which focused on the shallowest adolescent concerns with a handful of endlessly repeated teenspeak phrases and attitudes. Second, the setting was extremely limited — the girl’s school, the school grounds, the center court of a shopping center, and a weed-choked lot where the teens gathered — and constantly revisiting the same places for the same adolescent BS was tedious. Finally, French gave me no reason to care about the victim, which made it hard to care about who killed him. Although at 464 pages the novel wasn’t any longer than French’s other tales of the Dublin murder squad, it felt very long as I read it. My objections to this novel arise from a personal preference: I’m not a fan of coming-of-age novels and do my best to steer clear of teen protagonists. For the many Tana French fans who don’t share that view, The Secret Place will likely work very well indeed.