Both want desperately to prove themselves - Moran wants out of Cold Case and into Murder and Conway is still new to the Murder squad and has yet to prove herself - so this case means A LOT to both of them. French has brought back Frank Mackey (Frank now holds the record as the character to crop up the most frequently of all of the characters in the Dublin Murder Squad series), but the investigation team is a interesting mix: Cold Case detective Stephen Moran and Murder Squad detective Antoinette Conway. The reader is slowly exposed to pre-murder events and the post-murder questioning, allowing French latitude to make the reader privy to more information than any single character has access to. The big question is: does this narrative strategy work? Answer: kind of does. This time, the story alternates between two different chronological timelines: events leading up to the murder and the ramp up of a year old investigation when new evidence suddenly crops up. Given that French tries something new/different with each of her books, it was not surprising that she makes use of a different narrative strategy with this one. With the clues leading back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, to their rival clique, and to the tangle of relationships that bound them all to the murdered boy, the private underworld of teenage girls turns out to be more mysterious and more dangerous than the detectives imagined. Detective Stephen Moran has 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.” Stephen joins with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case-beneath the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Read the New York Times bestseller by Tana French, author of the forthcoming novel The Searcher and “the most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years” ( The Washington Post).Ī year ago a boy was found murdered at a girlsʼ boarding school, and the case was never solved. Tana French is simply this: a truly great writer.” -Gillian Flynn

The secret place by tana french