By Liz Soares
Tana French takes readers deep into a maelstrom of teen drama in her latest “Dublin Murder Squad” mystery, The Secret Place. It may be her best effort yet, and that’s high praise indeed.
The title refers to a bulletin board set up at St. Kilda’s, an exclusive girls’ school in Ireland’s capital city. Students are encouraged to post their innermost thoughts, anonymously; feelings they may not be able to talk about to anyone.
When 16-year-old Holly Mackey finds a disturbing message on the board one autumn day, she takes it to Stephen Moran of the Cold Case Squad. Holly is the daughter of undercover cop Frank Mackey, last seen in French’s Faithful Place. But she knows Moran from her involvement in a previous case, and trusts him.
The card is a photo of Chris Harper, a big man on campus at St. Colm’s, the boys’ school a few blocks away from St. Kilda’s. He had been found dead the previous spring—on the campus of the girls’ school. “I know who did it,” is scrawled on the card.
Moran is a handsome, genial redhead who aspires to join the Murder Squad. So he’s thrilled when he’s assigned to work the case with homicide detective Antoinette Conway. She had conducted the original investigation, but failed to find the murderer. Conway is razor-sharp, in both intelligence and personality. When a girl comes into the common room, squealing about her Ugg boots, Conway snarls, “Uggs. Fucking things should be banned.”
The two soon realize that Moran’s charm may be the key to getting the St. Kilda’s girls to talk—and give them the information they need to solve the case.
The timing of the placement of the card allows the detectives to narrow their focus to two groups of girls. One is led by the brittle “mean girl” Joanne Heffernano—four skinny blondes with fake tans, who apply the tenets of The Art of War to the dating scene. The other is Holly Mackey’s clique. Julia is clever; Selena beautiful, dreamy and artistic; and Becca is still finding her way in the world. They have vowed not to entangle themselves in relationships with boys, and the intensity of their friendship leads them to think they can turn lights on and off, or levitate pencils.
French tells her story in alternating chapters. The girls, the boys, their posturing at the Court—the local mall—the dances, and the lies adolescents tell each other, and themselves, as they search for love in all the wrong places. Chapter by chapter, the reader is brought closer to Chris’ death.
Meanwhile, the detectives are hard at it, interviewing the girls, reconstructing the crime, and, when it comes time to turn the screws on Holly, dealing with Frank Mackey, who doesn’t plan to have anything bad happen to his little girl. Moran despairs of searching wardrobes and finding underwear and Tampax. It comes as an amazement to the reader when they nail the case in a very long 24 hours. Really? It seems like three days, at least.
The girls are astutely drawn, as they speak in text-talk—“totes amazeballs,” and lots of “OMGs.” In one telling scene, Julia dubs Joanne’s group “The Daleks,” after the robotic cyborgs of Doctor Who. The case hinges on a pink cell phone and the random, banal messages that fly between friends and lovers.
As always in French’s novels, the Irish lilt can be heard in the characters’ voices, “You’re in a hurry to get back to class. Studious, yeah?” When things go well, they’re “grand.” And although Moran notes that the girls speak in a more mid-Atlantic accent than he does, they also talk about “ickle” babies and “mingers.”
The Secret Place is a solid police procedural, but also so much more. The inner lives of teenage girls are intensely portrayed, and the growing partnership between Moran and Conway delicately limned. The plot would be enough to make a fine book, but the depth and passion of the characters carries it to the realm of excellence. A must read.
