emmagetz 's review for:

The Secret Place by Tana French

5.0

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“Grown-ups hammer down all these markers, bells schedules coffee-breaks, to stake down time so you’ll start believing it’s something small and mean, something that scrapes flake after flake off of everything you love till there’s nothing left; to stake you down so you won’t lift off and fly away, somersaulting through whirlpools of months, skimming through eddies of glittering seconds, pouring handfuls of hours over your upturned face.”

4.5/5

After reading the first two Dublin Murder books, I was obsessed with the way Tana French wrote character drama as the backdrop to her mysteries—in fact, I preferred the interpersonal lives of the main characters to the actual mysteries. Here, she combines the two perfectly and succeeds where I think the first two didn’t, which is definitely thanks to making the mystery the actual narrative happening at the same time it’s being solved. The pacing was perfect and everything came together so well. French knows how to capture teenage girls and the intoxicating magic and agonies of their friendships. I think the supporting characters could have been a little more fleshed out but there were so many characters it’s barely a complaint. The only thing I will say is that I preferred the Rob/Cassie drama in the first two books and was invested in them way more than I was invested in Stephen and Conway, but I could tell French was trying to make this balance on purpose so I don’t mind very much. This is definitely the best of the series that I’ve read so far, even if my favorite characters were not present.