The Secret Place

‘To say Tana French is one of the great thriller writers is really too limiting. Rather she‘s simply this: a truly great writer‘ GILLIAN FLYNN ‘[Crime fiction‘s] biggest contemporary star‘ GUARDIAN ‘One of the finest writers of contemporary crime fiction‘ DAILY MAIL ------------------------------------------------------- The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago. The caption says, ‘I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM‘. Detective Stephen Moran hasn‘t seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she‘s sixteen and she‘s shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story. Even in her exclusive boarding school, terrible things can happen. The previous year, a boy from the neighbouring school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card. Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get it solved, he will have to work with prickly Detective Antoinette Conway. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly inhabits, disentangling a twisted web of lies in the process. ------------------------------------------------------- Praise for the talismanic Tana French and her novels ‘French pegs each [character] with cold, cruel precision, one by one, like a knife thrower popping balloons...it makes the world of The Secret Place pop into prickly-sharp focus and full colour‘ TIME ‘Terrific--terrifying, amazing, and the prose is incandescent‘ STEPHEN KING ‘I can do you no greater favour in life than recommending that you read her books‘ GUARDIAN ‘The most interesting, the most important crime novelist to emerge in the last ten years‘ WASHINGTON POST ‘The most breathtakingly brilliant and close-to-perfect thriller I‘ve read for a long time‘ SOPHIE HANNAH ‘I‘m a big fan of Tana French‘ IAN RANKIN ‘This is a tour de force of suspense and storytelling. Comes closer to perfection than anything I‘ve read in the last decade‘ SARAH HILARY ‘French offers a masterclass in unreliability‘ SUNDAY TIMES ‘An audacious departure for this immensely talented author . . . not to be missed‘ NEW YORK TIMES ‘A wonderfully assured and beautifully written debut novel‘ IRISH INDEPENDENT