The Secret Place

Description

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.

Tana French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the United States and Malawi. She trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin and has worked mainly in theatre. Her first novel, In the Woods, was published in 2007; it won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards for Best First Novel and the IVCA Clarion Award for Best Fiction. In the Woods and her second novel, The Likeness, were both New York Times bestsellers. Broken Harbour won the BGE Crime Fiction Book of the Year award in 2012 and the LA Times prize for best Mystery/Thriller. She lives in Dublin with her husband and daughters.

A gripping tale...[a] vivid account of the crackling intensity of adolescence * Irish Times * Evocative of Donna Tartt's New England college campus mystery The Secret History...French has the ability to transport one back to the awkward, stumbling days of one's teenage years * Irish Examiner * Lyrical descriptions and a taut plot make this a pitch-perfect thriller * Evening Echo * French is simply a brilliant writer...her books transcend genre. Her prose is 'literary fiction', her plots are intricate, her characters and dialogue compellingly real * Sunday Independent * The Secret Place is cleverly plotted and beautifully written, offering an unrivalled insight into the hormone-fuelled world of privileged teenagers * Irish Independent * The Secret Place is excellent - chilling and poetic, perfectly paced and decidedly moreish * Hot Press *