The Secret Place: Dublin Murder Squad: 5

Another Tana French thriller that is definitely worth a read. The language is poetic and evocative and the atmosphere is built up beautifully. Also gives a terrific insight into the concept of friendship and loyalty among teens. A page turner that leaves you thinking...

Very intense read.. Lots of characters

One murder. Eight suspects. All of them are lying. How do you get to the truth?When a boy was found murdered at St. Kilda's- a girls boarding school, the case was left unsolved due to lack of evidence. Now, a year later, the cops recieve a photograph of the victim with the caption: I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.Intriguing plot and great pacing. I was hooked from the beginning. Even though the entire book comprises of a single day and revolves around eight 16 year old girls and two cops, French manages to give all of them different, individual personalities- each with a secret.What set this book apart from the rest for me was that we follow the mystery from the cop's POV. So instead of a 'big reveal' in the end, we solve the case chapter by chapter. You think you've solved it and then you get another clue that renders your theory useless.Although it isn't the best mystery I've ever read, it was a great read that I enjoyed every moment of. And it definitely made me love Tana French. Can't wait to read the rest of her work.

Tana French is one of those authors I'm aware of, but haven't managed to read yet. I recently picked up the audio version of her latest - The Secret Place - to keep me company on the drive back and forth to work. This is the fifth book in the Dublin Murder Squad series.Chris Harper was found murdered a year ago in a secluded grove on the grounds of St. Kilda's boarding school. The case is still open with no new leads.....until a card with a photo of the dead boy is found on the school's 'secrets board'. It's enough to reignite the investigation.The book takes place over the course of a day as Detectives Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway re-interview the students.I quite like the two detectives and would be interested in reading more of this pair. What had me somewhat bored was the repetitiveness of the girls' conversations. You can only listen to so many OMG's, Hellloooo's, Excuse me's and more. Yes I believe it's quite true to teenage conversation, but in audio format it just started to grate. And I found myself tuning out and thinking of throwing in the towel on this one. Then French threw in a bit of a different element - otherworldly if you will. Intrigued again, I kept listening.French is a good writer and some of her turns of phrase and descriptive phrases are really well done. Nuance and intuition are a large part of Moran's personality and investigative style. These nebulous concepts are given concrete descriptors that really painted vivid images and settings. The exploration of cliques and the world of teenagers is vividly portrayed. French paints a frightening 'mean girl.'The book is quite long - at 464 pages, I think it could have been pared down a little. Much of the narrative seemed to repeat itself with the clues as to who the killer is (very) slowly doled out. I kept listening as I really wanted to know which girl was the culprit And the answer is there, but the actual ending was a bit confusing - I had to go back and listen a few times. And at the end, I really wondered why the supernatural element was included. It would have been a good book without it.There were two readers - Stephen Hogan and Lara Hutchinson. Both are Irish actors, so the accents are real. Hogan embodies the mental image I had created for this character. Hutchinson captures the toughness of Conway. Both narrators read the voices of the teenage girls and caught the sarcasm, the anger and the nastiness of them.On reading other's reviews, I'm seeing the recommendation to not start with this book if you're new to Tana French, that it is decidedly different from other books in the series. Fair enough - I'll try the next book French releases. (I'm one of those readers who can't won't go backwards in a series)

Having just read French's 'In the Woods', I was eager to read another of her books, as I really enjoyed her debut novel. This one, however, tried my patience to the limit and in the end I binned it. A murdered boy is found on the grounds of a posh girls' boarding school and the crime remains unsolved for a year. A new piece of information re-ignites the investigation and sets the book in motion. One problem with this book is that 8 teenage girls are the chief suspects and there are pages and pages detailing the interviews. It is very hard for the reader to keep track of which girl is which - and two of the main characters have names beginning with 'J' which I find annoying. This makes it even harder to sort them all out. I had to keep reminding myself which girl was Julia and which was Joanne. The two detectives aren't nearly as interesting and engaging as the pair who solved the mystery of 'In the Woods'. It is actually hard to believe this book was written after 'In the Woods'. I think it may have been sitting in a drawer along with other rejected manuscripts, and then dusted off after the success of French's first published novel. I don't feel the writer has a great sense of teenage thinking or dialogue. It's very hard to get that right and she has not done it here. Anyway, halfway through the book I realized I had no interest in who killed the boy, and would have been happy for a fire to burn down the school and all the girls in it. So I binned the book and will never discover who killed Chris.

I have greatly enjoyed and admired Tana French's previous novels, but this one has been a disappointment. I actually read the reviews first and was aware that many of the author's fans didn't like this book much, but since the book cost only a fraction of the others, I thought it was worth trying. I should have paid attention to those reviews, and I should have wondered why the publishers were selling this book so cheaply.The writing style is smooth, the background feels authentic, and the characterisation is superb, but the plot is only so-so, and the structure is weak.With eight main suspects, all eight of whom are teenage girls of the same age attending the same boarding school with the same interests and the same secrets, it's difficult to keep them apart. Halfway through the book I was finally able to differentiate them and appreciate their distinct personalities. But by that time, it was too late, and I couldn't remember who had said what.The structure is odd. It alternates between chapters from the point-of-view of the investigator after the murder happened, and chapters from the point of view of one of the eight teenage girls who are the main suspects. The structure might work but unfortunately it doesn't.The chapters from the PoV of the investigator, a fiercely ambitions dead-cases officer who wants to get into the murder squad at almost any price, who possess brilliant people skills yet isn't social, unfold at a good pace and are a pleasure to read. But the chapters from the various girls' perspectives... they don't work. In part this is because there are simply too many changes, and the reader needs to get into the head of a different person every view pages. In part it's because the chapters are all written in the same voice, not reflecting the distinct personalities of the point-of-view characters. And most annoyingly, in each chapter theres a break of point of view when, tucked at the end of an unconnected paragraph, there's the statement 'Chris as x-number weeks to live.' Since the girls didn't know Chris was going to get murdered, they couldn't have been aware how much time was left until his murder. So this jolted me out of their point of view into a God's-view (omniscient) perspective. And in the next sentence the reader is supposed to be back inside the girl's mind, worrying about make-up, breaking curfew, secret smokes and boys.If you're a fan of Tana French, by all means read this book. You may enjoy it. But if you're new, try one of her other books first (perhaps 'The Likeness' The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2 (Dublin Murder Squad series) ) to get an impression of what she can really do. The Likeness: Dublin Murder Squad: 2 (Dublin Murder Squad series)

Giving up around half way through. Possibly the worst detective novel I've ever read. Corny dialogue from the hard boiled female lead detective - attempts at reproducing the conversational language of teenage girls read as very silly. The author has tried to develop an original style but the descriptive writing is pretentious. Police procedure aspect seems very unlikely with an officer wandering off to join another department at will - and an investigating officer rampaging around a sensitive murder investigation with no senior oversight - laughable. A strange supernatural theme appears at one point with characters being able to switch lights on and off apparently telepathically - but this then doesn't go anywhere - and if it's resolved later in the book you'll need more patience than me to wait for it. Worst thing is - nothing happens - it just drags on and on and on in the middle with no progress made in plot or characterisation. Utterly tedious.

I really liked it - school story, murder story, well depicted female protagonists are all things that appeal to me in a book.I really enjoyed the twin story lines and the book as a whole so much that I have now gone straight back to reread the action in chronological orderthat is to say the prologue and the even numbered chapters which give the backstory and immediate aftermath of the murder from the point of view of four school-friends. and then the odd numbered chapters which give the day long re-opened murder investigation a year after the crime was committed.I can see why the story would have annoyed some people in its style/content, but it's a good fit for me and I feel like I've got two books for the price of one.

I enjoyed reading The Secret Place but I have some reservations. The crime plot is extremely thin - the murder of a private school boy found in the grounds of a private girls school (no prizes for guessing why he was there) a year before but the police couldn't find a suspect and re-investigate a year later when new evidence turns up - and could have been told in under 100 pages but I feel that the crime is only the hook to allow Ms French to examine the nature of friendship and loyalty.The re-investigation takes place in the space of a day but this is a very long book so it includes many flashbacks to before Chris Harper was killed and his influence over his peers. I can't help but think that Ms French attaches too many adult thoughts to a hormonal 15 year old. I think she got her characterisation of Joanne and her crew, the teen queens, spot on but I'm not so sure about the other group, Holly, Julia, Selena and Rebecca. Their friendship is claustrophobic and childish in many ways but I've never known a group of 4 teenagers to be able to sustain such intensity over a prolonged period of time without falling out.Despite these reservations and guessing early on whodunit I found The Secret Place to be quite engrossing. There are new revelations on almost every page and I was intrigued by how and why the teenagers started revealing information they'd kept hidden the previous year.This book is obviously not to everyone's taste but, if you can put up with the teen speak and neuroses and don't want a straightforward police procedural, this could be the book for you as it draws you in and keeps you turning the pages one small reveal at a time.

This is a book that stayed in my mind long after I finished it. It is in a league of its own: ostensibly a whodunnit, yet undoubtedly literary fiction, and far more about the bewilderment, magic and occasional catastrophes of growing up than a simple solving of a murder.Earlier reviewers have complained about the length and the implausibility of events occurring in a single day and, perhaps, in conjunction, these are are flaws. The single day framing device didn't bother me; it is a novel, not a history and the atmosphere is deliberately contrived to be enclosed (in the best tradition of murder mysteries) .There are flickers of magical realism within it and the quality of the writing, particularly the intensity of teenage girls' relationships, their landscapes and dreams, is beautifully, sometimes achingly well, achieved. French has an ear for the speech patterns of an age group (yes, with all its irritations of jargon and repetition) and juxtaposes this against lyrical, other worldly bursts of emotional clarity and pain. She catches the evolving characters of girls growing from children into adulthood at different speeds and different levels of maturity and she writes believably but without sentimentality of the loyalties of peerr-bonding and young love.I found this a surprisingly moving book for one in its genre because it is also centrally about the timeless themes love and loss and sacrifice.

I had previously read Tara French's In the Woods which I really liked and The Likeness, which I didn't so wasn't too sure what to expect. I wasn't disappointed although the settings and story-line couldn't be more different.The story centres around a dysfunctional working class Irish family and their relationships which, when developed, ultimately reveal the solution to the mystery. Not an easy thing to pull off but this was very well done. I found myself both liking and hating the family at different times and gradually became engrossed in their problems and ambitions to escape from their lot. I did find the main copper rather one dimensional however in that he resorted to aggression at the slightest provocation, hence four rather than five stars.If you like fast moving action then this may not be for you as the story is fairly slow to develop but I liked the characterization and understanding the "why done it" aspect to the book. The solution wasn't obvious but still wasn't that difficult to predict but for me ultimately wasn't that important.

A tightly controlled narrative as two detectives who neither know nor trust each other investigate a cold case and find themselves coming under pressure from third parties. It's a gripping story that is revealed in its details at a pace that is tightly controlled by the author.In the end, though, does the solution warrant the build-up? It's entertaining on the way, at least.

Such a disappointment! The first four books were excellent. This one was a struggle.Very poorly written in some places and a suspension of disbelief wasn’t forthcoming - paranormal nonsense!Also too many characters getting mixed up and structure not good.Such a shame

Other tana French books were really well written with good story lines and good characterisation. This one had none of those. It became a case of forgetting to tell the story and became too much about trying to write " cleverly"It was extremely repetitive and as others have reviewed needed much more editing. The length of a book does not denote that it is a great read. I found myself being so annoyed with the characters and how they spoke and the endless descriptions about what friendship means ⑦

"Hello, OMG! Amazeballs!"I love detective stories and I loved all of Tana French's previous books, but I cannot begin to understand how this one had so many rave reviews . It is clumsily constructed, has page after page of repetitive interviews with shallow, sullen, obnoxious teenagers; awful with-it teenspeak about who was "weird" and who was "into" who; lots of complicated, confusing business with mobile phones being swapped and stolen with messages deleted. And in the end the two detectives didn't even manage themselves to discover the murderer (whose motive I found totally unconvincing) before the answer was handed to them on a plate.And are Irish exclusive girls' Catholic schools really anything like St. Kilda's? Would parents really spend thousands a year to leave their daughters in such a lax, permissive institution where they seemed able to get away with just about anything, let alone murder? It made St.Trinians look like Cheltenham Ladies' College.I don't like being so critical, especially as it was clearly a great read for many others, but for me this was such a disappointment.

The beginning was intriguing but I soon realised that the plot was not complex enough to fill over 500 pages. I persevered until the supernatural stuff started happening and decided that life's too short to waste on this poor effort.

I really liked the first three of Ms French's novels. Broken Harbour was a bit shaky, but I hadn't given up on her so I got this one.It must have been fairly easy to read because it didn't take me long, despite being about 500 pages. It was, however, far too long. There simply wasn't enough story. I did not like any of the characters, and some of the dialogue was grating. The worst bit was the "spooky" stuff. What was that all about? If she is trying to introduce that into her books, then they are veering away into dodgy ground. None of the spooky stuff was explained. Was it real? Was it imagined? Was it fake? Do I care? Not really. The book would have been better without it.I will read Ms French's next offering but, if that isn't much good either, I may leave her.

I struggled to get through this book and skimmed through most of the second half. It is basically an in depth examination of the lives and minds of a few teenage girls (yawn). The who-did-it plot is weak and only mildly entertaining.

100s of pages of teenspeak interviews, seasoned with a half-hearted attempt at magical realism. I ended up wishing they'd all been murdered.