398. The Secret Place
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Tana French
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Foreign
480 pages, published August 28, 2014
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
A year after the discovery of a teenaged boy’s murder at a girlsʼ boarding school, Detective Stephen Moran is brought in with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case. Moran had been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.” Under the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Moran and Conway investigate the murder which leads them to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, a rival clique, and to the snarl of relationships that bound all of them to the murdered boy.
Quotes
“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”
“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.”
“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”
“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”
“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”
“They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”
My Take
The Secret Place is the sixth book was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fifth in her Dublin Murder Squad series). While I loved her other books (The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor) I liked, but did not love, The Secret Place. I found the characters and the central mystery a bit less interesting than previous French reads. It is still a good book, just not quite up the standard French sets in many of her other books.
