So the last time I talked about Tana French’s books, I was delighted by the Möbius strip impossibility of ranking my favorite among her first four novels.
I’m equally delighted to take a scissor to the strip. Every one of Tana French’s books is wonderful, but The Secret Place is just that little bit more so. Or rather, it’s an extra heaping dose – on every page – of the things she does best.
The Secret Place brings back detective Stephen Moran and also Holly Mackey from Faithful Place, which draws the inevitable cameo of her da, Frank, who readers will remember with varying degrees of antipathy from both The Likeness and Faithful Place. (I, for the record, enjoy the hell out of Frank Mackey.)
The murder of young Chris Harper on the grounds of a girls’ school is chilling – in at least two senses of the word. A beautiful, popular boy cut down in the moonlight freezes both the community and St. Kilda’s faculty and students, but the case itself has also gone cold. That is, until Holly Mackey brings a card, pried from the school’s confessional bulletin board, The Secret Place, to Stephen, the cop she chooses over her father to spark onto the year-old investigation. The card reads: I Know Who Killed Him.
The story takes place in a single day, with flashbacks into the tangles of teenage politics and crystalline glimpses of youth blooming into independence. Our narrator, Stephen, struggles on a tightrope, looking to wring every professional advantage from this gift of opportunity as its balanced against what’s at risk for everyone involved. The mystery is cracking. The resolution is wrenching.
And still it’s not the best part of the book.
That would be the writing. Tana French vaults everything she’s done yet with jeweled tone and sparkling description to put the reader everywhere they need to be. Sometimes it’s painful. I cried about seven times. But I full-on cheered once. Scared the hell out of my husband while he was driving.
Truly, The Secret Place is a wonderful book. It comes out September 2, 2014. Get it as soon as you can.
Because I Love To Hear Myself Type 