The same again, runs the advice when it comes to writing a series of commercial bestsellers, just a little different. Tana French's debut novel, In the Woods (2007), won the Edgar, Macavity, Barry and Anthony awards in the United States. An elegantly written police procedural, it has served as a template for her body of work to date.
The Likeness (2008), Faithful Place (2010) and Broken Harbour (2012) – the latter won the Irish Book Award for crime fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for a mystery or thriller – have all featured murder investigations rooted in the warped psychology of small, intensely bonded groups.
French gives the "just a little different" advice a unique spin. Rather than a familiar protagonist or detective returning each time, French promotes a minor character from a previous novel to centre stage. In The Secret Place our narrator is Stephen Moran, who we first met in Faithful Place as the ambitious young sidekick to the investigating detective, Frank Mackey.
Now stuck working cold cases, Det Moran sees an opportunity for advancement when Holly Mackey, Frank’s daughter, arrives with a chilling message. A boarder at the exclusive St Kilda’s, on the outskirts of Dublin, Holly brings Moran a note she discovered pinned to “the Secret Place”, a notice board at St Kilda’s where pupils can anonymously post their thoughts, desires and frustrations.
“I know who killed him,” says the note; the “him” is Christopher Harper, a popular 16-year-old from nearby St Colm’s school, who was murdered almost a year previously.
Taking the note to Det Antoinette Conway, who investigates murders, Moran inveigles his way into the team – a relatively easy thing to do, as none of Conway’s colleagues want to work with her – and the pair set off to St Kilda’s to interview the girls who might have posted the note.
What follows is a very long day’s journey into night. The story unfolds over an increasingly fraught and tense 12 or so hours, with Moran’s first-person narration of contemporary developments broken up by third-person accounts from Holly and her friends – Selena, Rebecca and Julia – that recount significant events in the year leading up to Harper’s murder.
Gripping tale
It’s a gripping tale on a number of levels, all of them concerned with the psychology of relationships.
Moran and Conway start out at loggerheads, each suspicious of the other’s motives – Conway has been tainted by her involvement in the initial murder investigation, which yielded nothing but a conviction for possession with intent to sell for one of the St Kilda’s gardeners – but soon realise that they will need to join forces if they are to penetrate the protective shield thrown up by the fiercely protective teenage girls.
The combative odd-couple detectives who belatedly and begrudgingly come to respect one another is a standard trope in the crime genre, but what causes most friction between this pair is their shared rough-and-tumble upbringing on hard-knock council estates in north Dublin, an experience a long way removed from the wealthy privilege of St Kilda’s and its leafy environs.
Where the story really scores, however, is the way in which French gets under the skin of her teenage characters. Holly, Julia et al start off as a relatively normal group of friends but quickly draw much closer, and possibly become dangerous to themselves and others – fellow pupils describe the quartet as witches – as their shared experiences wind so tightly around them as to bind them into a single personality.
Feeling their way blind through adolescence, bewildered by the expectations – particularly those of a sexual nature – of the big, bad world beyond the school walls, crazed by hormones and concerned only for the now, Holly and her friends become much more than the sum of their parts as their collective energy seeks an outlet.
In its vivid account of the crackling intensity of adolescence, The Secret Place brings to mind recent novels by Megan Abbott and Kevin Power's Bad Day in Blackrock, but also, as the title might well be alluding to, Donna Tartt's The Secret History.
As always, French offers a sharp contrast between her narrative prose and her characters’ dialogue. Seen through the eyes of Det Moran, who regrets not having similar educational opportunities, St Kilda’s is rendered a fabulous and almost mythical kind of oasis. When Det Conway, as the pair first arrive at the school, pours scorn on its aspirational ethos, Moran silently admires a “portico held up by slim curl-topped columns; a rooftop balustrade, pillars curved delicate as vases. Perfect, it was . . . every inch.”
‘OMG whatevs’
That fragile beauty is rather undermined by the way the girls speak, their conversations delivered in the mid-Atlantic “OMG whatevs” hybrid that is, to French’s credit, at times irritatingly pitch-perfect.
Meanwhile, the back-and-forth between Conway and Moran is harshly abrasive, although privately Moran craves the finer things, a different kind of world from the one he lives in: “I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”
It’s a philosophy, offered early in the story, that drops a broad hint about the motive for murder, which may well appear slight to some readers.
By then, however, French has so embroiled the reader in the claustrophobically febrile world of her adolescent characters that hard-headed adult logic no longer applies – and, besides, a motive for murder only ever needs to make sense to the killer.
