The Secret Place

A boy from a neighbouring school was found dead on the grounds of St Kilda's, a girls' boarding school in Dublin, and the case went cold.

A year later a pupil brings Detective Stephen Moran a card from the school's anonymous noticeboard, carrying a photograph of the boy and the words that someone knows who killed him.

An anonymous card on a school noticeboard, a year after the case went cold.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The present-day investigation takes place across one day at the school, with Moran and Antoinette Conway interviewing eight girls in rotation.

The compression is the novel's structural achievement. Almost everything that happens in the present is conversation in rooms, and the pressure is generated entirely by what the detectives learn between interviews.

Alternating chapters follow the girls over the preceding year, told in close third person and building to the death.

The two threads converge precisely, and the reader understands the social situation considerably before the detectives extract it. French also writes the girls' sections in a register noticeably closer to their own speech, which distinguishes the two threads without requiring any signposting.

The four girls at the novel's centre have a relationship of deliberate intensity — a pact, a set of rituals, a rejection of the surrounding social economy — that French takes entirely seriously.

The refusal to condescend is the book's most distinctive quality, and the friendship is written as something genuinely powerful rather than as a phase.

A second group of four girls occupies the opposing position, and the antagonism between them is social rather than physical for most of the book.

French is exact about the mechanics of adolescent cruelty: the withheld invitation, the photograph circulated, the rumour that cannot be answered.

Several sequences suggest that the girls' pact has produced something genuinely uncanny, and the novel neither confirms nor dismisses it.

It is the most divisive element. Readers who want a procedural find it indulgent; readers who accept it find it the truest thing in the book about what that age feels like.

The detective is ambitious, from a working-class background, and acutely aware that the case is his opportunity to leave cold cases behind.

His willingness to use a teenage girl's trust for career advancement is examined rather than excused, and French is unsentimental about it. French also lets him be genuinely good at the interviews, so his ambition and his competence are inseparable rather than in tension.

His partner is abrasive, isolated within the squad and openly hostile to being managed, and the developing working relationship between them is the series thread this book advances.

She becomes the narrator of the following novel, and her characterisation here is the setup for it.

The boarding school's wealth is constantly present and the detectives' positions relative to it are specified precisely.

French is among the best contemporary crime writers on class, and the novel's interviews are shaped throughout by who is accustomed to being believed. The boarders' assumption that they will be treated carefully, and the detectives' awareness of it, shapes nearly every exchange in the book.

Dense, long-sentenced and heavily interior, with the girls' sections written in a register close to their own.

It is the most literary writing in this section and is also the slowest, and readers who want velocity will find it a considerable adjustment. French also writes at length, and the novel runs well over five hundred pages of what is essentially a single day plus one year of background.

Each Dublin Murder Squad novel takes a minor character from the previous book as its narrator, which lets French change register completely each time.

The books stand alone and the sequence rewards being read in order for the accumulating institutional portrait. The Likeness and Broken Harbour are generally considered the strongest, and readers who want the series' best work should begin with one of those.

Readers who want crime fiction that is genuinely about something other than the crime, and who value psychological depth over pace.

It is the most divisive book in the series and, for readers who respond to it, among the best. Anyone unsure should start with In the Woods or The Likeness instead.