The Secret Place (2014)
Tana French (1973)
452 pages
In the Prologue to Tana French’s mystery novel, The Secret Place, four girls sprawl languidly on a playground, enjoying a late summer day together even as their attention turns to their up-coming third year at St. Kilda’s, a girls’ secondary school in an affluent corner of Dublin. Though they have been friends for several years, they will now be boarding together at the school, sharing a room, and will soon discover that the already complicated dynamics of teenage relationships will be intensified in the isolated crucible of St. Kilda’s. Far from parents and the adult world they have known, the friends and their fellow boarders will have little contact with anyone outside the school --- except for the occasional and even more fraught interactions with their counterparts from the boys’ school up the road, Colm’s.
The story proper opens a year and a half later, when one of the four friends, Holly, shows up at a police station with a photo of a Colm’s boy we come to learn had been found murdered on the grounds of St Kilda’s the previous spring. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the case had remained unsolved, and finally disappeared from the headlines. But now this photo appears, with the message “I know who killed him” pasted across the bottom, formed out of words cut from a magazines. That suddenly a case that had gone cold heats back up.
Holly has brought the picture to a young detective, Stephen Moran, who she had met years before when she had been a witness on a case he had been involved in. She tells him that she found the picture at St Kilda’s on a board, the Secret Place of the title, where the girls can post pictures and notes anonymously --- an attempt by the ruling nuns to create a relief valve for the fervid passions of their pent-up wards. Moran takes the information to the lead detective of the original murder case, Antoinete Conway, and asks to assist with the investigation. Conway, whose prickly and edgy demeanor have meant she’s worked solo since her previous partner retired, reluctantly agrees, and the pair head off to the school.
The two detectives each come to the re-opened case with ulterior motives and a deep-seated skepticism of one another. Moran is plain-spoken and earnest, but nurses the hope that if he plays his cards right, his involvement on this high-profile investigation could become a springboard catapulting him onto the most prestigious part of the police force --- the Murder Squad. He has nothing against Conway, despite her reputation, but recognizes that he must tread lightly to avoid her mercilessly cutting him out of the investigation and sending him scuttling back to the station.
Conway, for her part, has no doubt about Moran’s aspirations in joining the case, and her natural distrust of anyone on the force --- grown out of the struggles she has faced as a woman who won’t back down to its macho mentality --- colors her expectations for working with him. But at the same time, the failure a year earlier to solve this case had been laid at her feet, and has weighed heavily on her pride. She knows that she cannot afford to let her personal concerns about Moran’s possible motives derail this unexpected opportunity to finally solve the murder.
This second go at the investigation lasts the duration of the day Holly appeared at the police station, with French unveiling the story through a sequence of chapters that alternate between current and past events. In one sequence, we follow the investigation from the point of view of Detective Moran, hour by hour, as he and Conway spend the day at the school trying to determine who posted the picture on the board and hoping it will lead them to the murderer, even as they struggle to build a workable relationship with one another. The opposing sequence of chapters tells the story of the four girlfriends from the opening days of third year, to the time of the murder some eight months later.
Through French’s carefully crafted dance between these two timelines, we watch in one as the two detectives struggle to uncover bits and pieces of clues, while in the other we discover the complexity behind what little they can learn. The distinction in detective novels between what clues police officers can discover about events, and what the reader knows actually happened, is a familiar theme. But the overlapping structure in The Secret Place --- the careful integration of past and present --- makes sharply evident the depth of the difference between the tidbits of information the detectives divine and what had actually happened.
Central to events is the profound relationship Molly and her three friends had developed during the school year, as well as their often petty if nonetheless pernicious psychological jousting with the self-defined lead-dog among their classmates and her clique of three friends. Moran and Conway struggle to break through the veil of secrecy that all eight girls try to maintain --- a view of life at the school the girls carefully craft for these adult intruders. Ultimately the detectives can only catch glimpses of the complex dynamics among Molly and her friends, and between them and their rivals, that we as readers are privy to.
But, even we readers are left guessing right to the end, as French’s skillful interlacing of the two timelines has the benefit of aligning the revelation of the novel’s surprising conclusions: we arrive essentially simultaneously at the moment of the murder and the discovery of the murderer. Along the way, despite having opened with news of the murder, French manages to continuously ratchet up the tension. She opens each of the chapters set in the months leading up to the murder with a countdown of how long the Colm’s boy has to live, even as he – neither completely innocent nor a cad, simply human – becomes unwittingly ensnared in a web of confusion arising out of the angst and machinations of the eight St. Kilda’s girls at the heart of the story. And, as the two sparing detectives tease out these girls’ intentions and schemes, they, and we, are left fully engaged but guessing to the very end.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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