My long-postponed book report on "The Secret Place", by Tana French. [View all]

First, I will unequivocally state that Tana French is one of most favorite authors - I rank her right there up at the top of my list with Arnaldur Indriðason. As anyone who has followed my posts in this group probably knows by now, my main reading material these days is crime fiction, particularly by northern European authors, and more particularly by Scandinavian authors.

Tana French, however, is an Irish author, and she is damn good.

The Secret Place is the fifth book in her "Dublin Murder Squad" series. As a series, this one is somewhat unusual in that each book of the series features a different member of the Murder Squad in the leading role, so that a character who was somewhat peripheral in one book becomes the main protagonist in the next book.

The story in The Secret Place concerns the murder of a teenage boy whose body was found on the grounds of a private girl's school. He was a student at a nearby private boy's school. Both schools accomodate both boarding students and day students. As the story opens, we first meet four girls who are longtime friends, two of whom have been boarding at the school for several years, and two of whom are about to become boarders for their final four years of schooling. (The Irish school system is different from the U.S. system, in that post-elementary schooling is divided by first year, second year, third year, etc. - going up to sixth year - pre-college - when the students are about 18 years old - the story takes place when the girls are going through their third and fourth years, loosely equivalent to being freshman and sophomores in American high school.)

When the detectives come into the story, a year has already passed since the discovery of the body and the initial investigation, which was completely unsuccessful in finding the murderer. One of the detectives was part of the initial investigation, who takes on a new partner when one of the girls brings him a new piece of evidence that impels her to open up a new investigation into the year old crime.

It's a bit tricky to read, in that every other chapter focuses on the girls, beginning with the start of their "third year" in the fall. The murder has taken place in the spring of that year, and the new investigation of the murder takes place in the spring of the following year. The girls' story weaves a long spiral that eventually winds its way into the present day part of the story. It's a fascinating and skillful piece of writing, and I have to say that the denouement was pretty much a complete surprise.

The book ends with the action taken by one of girls that sets off the new investigation. So, you get to the end, when the murder has been solved, and there you are back at the starting point again. For myself, all I could do was plunge right back into the beginning of the book, and read the whole thing again, straightaway.