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A review by katherineflitsch_
The Secret Place by Tana French
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
4.0
There’s a lot that I loved about this one: the boarding school setting, the teenage nostalgia, the back-and-forth between likable Detective Moran and ethereal coverage of the girls (evocative of BRUTES). It wasn’t the most complicated mystery, but I don’t think the case itself was the focal point of this book.
My biggest qualm (which I was far less bothered by when distance built up a buffer) was the thread of supernatural—in a vacuum I would have loved it, but coming in the fifth book of a series otherwise starkly in the camp of realism, I found it dissenting from the series, and I found that off-putting.
But then I went about a week with my reading on pause, and when I came back to the book I wasn’t so bothered. So I think my advice is yes read this book if you appreciate a boarding school setting and a mystery tied up in youth and the underbelly of teenage drama. But just don’t read it right after a binge of French’s previous novels in this series. Certainly give yourself some space between reading BROKEN HARBOR and picking up this one. And then, if you like Tana French (particularly for her prose) then you’ll love THE SECRET PLACE too.
My biggest qualm (which I was far less bothered by when distance built up a buffer) was the thread of supernatural—in a vacuum I would have loved it, but coming in the fifth book of a series otherwise starkly in the camp of realism, I found it dissenting from the series, and I found that off-putting.
But then I went about a week with my reading on pause, and when I came back to the book I wasn’t so bothered. So I think my advice is yes read this book if you appreciate a boarding school setting and a mystery tied up in youth and the underbelly of teenage drama. But just don’t read it right after a binge of French’s previous novels in this series. Certainly give yourself some space between reading BROKEN HARBOR and picking up this one. And then, if you like Tana French (particularly for her prose) then you’ll love THE SECRET PLACE too.