Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series beautifully balances poetic prose,
exciting mystery
and engaging, wonderfully flawed characters.
The
latter is French's true bread and butter, and it shines in The Secret
Place through both the detective duo and the girls of St. Kilda's
boarding school, where
a murder has taken place.
Here's
the thing: almost from the start I cared far more about the
relationships between the teenage girls (two rival cliques handled in
the most uncliched of
ways) and the two detectives investigating the case than I did about
the murder of a boy from the corresponding male boarding school.
And
that's okay. French ensnares her readers not with sensational deaths or
manipulative run-of-the-mill murder mystery tricks; she uses our
humanity so that we
have no choice but to find ourselves in the most unlikely of
characters: the newbie murder detective, the daydreamy teenage girl, the
high-strung headmistress.
Fans
of French's former four novels will adore The Secret Place - especially
in the last quarter of the novel, when Frank Mackey makes his cameo
appearance and
(as he always does) steals an already fabulous show.
RATING - 4.5
