Murder story that’s a joy to read

THE Secret Place is the fifth novel by the Dublin thriller writer Tana French, and it’s likely to follow previous efforts onto the New York Times bestseller list.

The action — which is evocative of Donna Tart’s classic New England college campus mystery, The Secret History — is set amongst the gilded halls of St Kilda’s, a girls’ boarding school in Dublin.

The body of a 16-year-old boy, Chris Harper, from a neighbouring boys’ school, is found on the girls’ school grounds one night, his head opened from a single blow to the head with a gardener’s hoe. A guy in a girls’ school at night? He’s presumed to have been on “a promise”, but nothing about his personality — plenty of mates, no enemies, “got rowdy sometimes, but it was just too much energy, not badness” — suggests why he should have ended up bludgeoned to death.

The murder case goes on a road to nowhere. There are no motives, no leads, no suspects. It’s confined to a dusty cold case drawer until Holly Mackey shows up one morning at her father’s police barracks with an anonymous note posted on her school noticeboard — the secret place of the book’s title where secret messages like “I hate my parents” or“I like this guy” are normally placed. The words on the note Holly presents are cut from a book to spell out the tease “I know who killed him” and were placed alongside a picture of the boy.

Detective Stephen Moran, 32, and keen to kick on from the cold case team to the elite murder case corps, snags the case. He has to pony up with a hard-ass senior colleague, Detective Antoinette Conway, to work it. The pair is both working-class Dublin. Conway is spiky, “a bit rough”, with a real chip on her shoulder, although she keeps surprising Moran, “re-writing what he thinks of her”, as a frisson crackles between them.

French’s wisecracking, sexist police banter is one of the joys of the novel. Moran gets a kick the first time he wanders into the murder squad room looking for Conway: “Murder is busy.

“Walk in there, feel your heart rate notch up. Phones ringing, computers clicking, people going in and out; not hurried, but fast. But a few of them took time out to give me a poke or two. You want Conway? Thought she was getting some, all right, she hasn’t bust anyone’s balls all week; never thought she was getting it off a guy, though. Thanks for taking one for the team, man. Got your shots?”

The novel’s chief characters, including the loathsome Joanne Heffernan, the queen bee of the school’s “cool crowd”, orbit a strange world. French, who spent her youth living in various corners, including Italy, the United States and Malawi, paints a vivid picture of this secluded land, a girls’ boarding school with its “small classes. Young Scientist awards everywhere.

“Everyone’s got perfect teeth, no one ever gets up the duff, and all the shiny little pedigree bitches go on to college.”

The girls’ cant — “OMG”; “jel” instead of jealous; “and hello: it worked” etc. — might irritate some ears but French has the ability to transport one back to the awkward, stumbling days of one’s teenage years — the telling of “possibly mostly true stories” to peers, the catiness, the misplaced cocksureness, and the endless hours spent loitering in groups in public places where “you have to keep talking or you’ll look like losers, but you can’t have an actual conversation because everyone’s thinking about other stuff”.