Kilda’s, looking for, at best, an informant at worst, a killer within.įrench is exquisitely sensitive to the look and manner of mean girls: the mocking stares, the whisper campaigns, the delicate skill with which cliques eviscerate the outsider.

In a nonce, the two accidental partners find themselves knocking at the polished door of St. Eager to make his mark in the elite ranks of the Murder Squad, Moran races the postcard over to Antoinette Conway, the prickly detective in charge of Harper’s stalled murder investigation. On it, an anonymous writer has scrawled, “I know who killed him.” The “him” in question is Chris Harper, a hottie from a nearby boys’ school whose flower-strewn corpse was discovered on the grounds of St.

The postcard Holly brings, however, is more menacing than melodramatic. “No point asking why anyone would want to. If you’ve got a secret, like if you hate your parents or you like a guy or whatever, you can put it on a card and stick it up there.’ It’s on the top floor, across from the art room. Here’s Holly’s explanation and Moran’s eye-rolling commentary: Holly turns up at the squad room one morning bent on giving Moran a postcard she found posted on a St. Six years earlier, Holly (whose father is homicide detective Frank Mackey) was a witness in a murder case, and Moran was the cop who interviewed her now she’s grown into a self-possessed young student at St. Kilda’s School in search of answers to a murder case turned cold. “The Secret Place,” French’s fifth Dublin Murder Squad novel, pries open the hermetically sealed world of teenagers at a tony girls’ prep school and lets readers peer into the toxic stew of hormones and homicidal rivalries roiling within.ĭetective Stephen Moran is the lucky lad selected by fate - in the form of 16-year-old Holly Mackey - to breach the walls of St. The mysterious depths of human personality are as intriguing to French as are the mysterious deaths that often set her stories in motion. Since each novel is told from a different detective’s point of view, we loyal readers come to know the characters inside and out - both in the way they see themselves and in the (often jarring) way others see them. Her Dublin Murder Squad series (which began in 2007 with “In the Woods,” which won the Anthony, Edgar, Macavity and Barry awards) relies on the simple device of a recurring cast of police detectives, although that device isn’t so simple psychologically. French is such a gorgeous writer: She’s a poet of mood and a master builder of plots that are positively Piranesi-like in their ingeniousness. Whenever someone asks me to name today’s top suspense novelists, my short list always includes Tana French.

The Secret Place by Tana French