Books |
Tana French: The Secret Place
By
Published: Sep 03, 2014
Category:
Mystery
Guest Butler Nora Levine is our Tana French expert; she last reviewed French’s “In the Woods.” In her other life, Levine, a former law librarian, unravels the mysteries of her husband’s legal briefs in Oakland, California.
As with thread in a delicate blanket stitch, Irish crime writer Tana French weaves characters from one novel into the next. Follow the thread: Detective Cassie Maddox appears in French’s debut novel, In the Woods, and reappears in her second, “The Likeness.” In her third book, “A Faithful Place,” undercover agent Frank Mackey (from “The Likeness”), aided by young detective Stephen Moran, investigates Frank’s high school sweetheart’s long ago disappearance and murder.
Now we come to “The Secret place.” Six years have passed, and Stephen Moran, not unhappy working cold cases, remembers that working murders is a step up:
Cold Cases is good. Very bleeding good for a guy like me: working-class Dub, first in my family to go for a Leaving Cert instead of an apprenticeship. I was out of uniform by twenty-six, out of the General Detective Unit and into Vice by twenty-eight. Into Cold Cases the week I turned thirty, hoping there was no word put in, scared there was. I’m thirty-two now. Time to keep moving up. Cold Cases is good. Murder is better.
And then there is St. Kilda’s, a private boarding school outside Dublin, where the principal attempts to keep at bay “social media” and all the phrase implies. Instead of Wi-fi , she has installed a bulletin board, an analog intranet, the “Secret Place” — the place where high school girls with vivid imaginations can anonymously post ideas and art and gossip and dreams, seemingly without repercussion.
But on a day like any other, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey, boarder at St. Kilda’s, daughter of Frank (we met her as a ten year old in “A Faithful Place”), walks into the police precinct, asks for Detective Moran and hands him what could be a clue in a murder about which she may have intimate knowledge. Perhaps postings on the “Secret Place” do have repercussions.
The crime: A year earlier Chris Harper, a student from a nearby boy’s school, was found dead on the grounds of St. Kilda’s. There wasn’t a girl at St. Kilda’s who didn’t know Chris or have an opinion about him. For all that, his murder remains unsolved. [To buy the paperback on Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
To solve it, Ms. French creates parallel narratives in alternating chapters. The first narrative begins at the start of the school year preceding the crime. The second narrative, told in first person present tense by Stephen Moran, relates the details of the new investigation which Holly’s fresh clue instigates. The technique is complex but effective. Each St. Kilda’s “back story” chapter moves up a month or so: “Monday morning, early, the bus grinding through traffic in stops and starts. Chris Harper has three weeks and less than four days left to live.” The present day “investigation” chapters occur within a single day: “The long corridor we’d walked that morning, to find the Secret Place. Then it had been humming with sun and busyness; now — Conway passed the light switch without a glance — it was twilit and sizeless.”
Holly is boarding with her three best friends and their loyalty to each other is limitless. A second clique of four boarders (think “Heathers”) doesn’t share the same sense of fidelity. Both groups are connected more intimately to Chris and his fate than they have been prepared to admit. Now the detectives have something in hand which might bring closure, if they can coerce the girls to speak honestly this time around.
As a graduate of a private girl’s high school, I can vouch for the accuracy of Ms. French’s depiction. The intensity of life at that age cannot be underestimated. For the young girls at St. Kilda’s every sideways glance from Chris Harper or his friends was cataloged, each insult from one of the Heathers dissected. So when Holly and her friends escaped from their dorm room to the school grounds after hours, they experienced freedom and the outdoors as if for the first time:
They run…they’ve never been here before. The tops of the cypresses blaze with frozen fire like great torches. There are things moving in the shadow, things that when they manage to catch a hair-thin glimpse are shaped like deer and wolves but they could be anything, circling. High in the shining column of air above the clearing, birds whirl arc-winged, long threads of savage cries trailing behind them.
Stephen Moran has his own set of first time experiences, and they aren’t nearly as enjoyable. The good news is he can work with Murder on this case. The bad news is he’s partnered with Detective Antoinette Conway, one of the few women working Murder. Not having solved Chris’ murder during the first investigation, she’s no walk in the park during the second, and she isn’t going to give Moran an inch on “her case.” Moran is acutely aware that Holly is his former boss’s daughter. He’s a guy surrounded by entirely too many females, high school and otherwise.
The remainder of the story is yours to enjoy. I do want to pay homage to Ms. French’s creation of Holly, Julia, Selena, Becca and the others. We aren’t just told who they are, we get to know them — from heartless and manipulative Joanne, to the ethereal Selena. Each displays a unique personality and voice. Like the author, I’m partial to Holly, a terrific young woman who is protective of her friends, suspicious of adults and committed to doing the right thing — she’s clearly her father’s daughter.
If you haven’t read any of Ms. French’s novels before, this is an entertaining and effective introduction. If you have, you know it’s grand to be back among familiar faces.
BONUS
For a Q&A with Tana French about ‘A secret Place” and more, click here.
