trusselltales 's review for:

The Secret Place by Tana French

4.0

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Lovely, luminous prose in this book, and a very believable portrayal of the claustrophobic yet potentially limitless world of a teenage girl. The mystery plot itself could have done with an editorial hand to tighten it up -much as I enjoyed the writing, the book doesn't need to be as long as it is. It's got two narrative strands, the here-and-now narrative by Stephen Moran, detective in Cold Cases who ends up investigating a year-old murder, due to his prior relationship with Holly; and a flashback narrative of four girls, including Holly, at a boarding school in the run up to the murder of a teenage boy from the school down the road. I liked both narratives, the development of the working relationship between Stephen and Conway from the Murder Squad was sharply done while I have to say the teenage girl narrative brought back a lot of memories of the intensity of being that age.