The secret place - Tana French

The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago.
The caption says, 'I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM'.

Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's sixteen and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story.

Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets. The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card.

Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get that solved, he will have to work with Detective Antoinette Conway - tough, prickly, an outsider, everything Stephen doesn't want in a partner. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly and her three closest friends inhabit and disentangle the truth from their knot of secrets, even as he starts to suspect that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear.

Tana French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the United States and Malawi. She is the author of In the Woods (winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards for Best First Novel), The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbour (winner of the LA Times prize for Best Mystery/Thriller), The Secret Place and The Trespasser (Crime Fiction Book of the Year, Irish Book Awards).
She lives in Dublin with her husband and two children.

www.tanafrench.com

The Secret Place is excellent - chilling and poetic, perfectly paced and decidedly moreish
Hot Press

The Secret Place is cleverly plotted and beautifully written, offering an unrivalled insight into the hormone-fuelled world of privileged teenagers
Irish Independent

French is simply a brilliant writer...her books transcend genre. Her prose is 'literary fiction', her plots are intricate, her characters and dialogue compellingly real
Sunday Independent

Lyrical descriptions and a taut plot make this a pitch-perfect thriller
Evening Echo

Evocative of Donna Tartt's New England college campus mystery The Secret History...French has the ability to transport one back to the awkward, stumbling days of one's teenage years
Irish Examiner

A gripping tale...[a] vivid account of the crackling intensity of adolescence
Irish Times