The Secret Place
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 a popular boy whose body was found at a girls’ boarding school a year earlier. The photo had been posted at “The Secret Place,” the school’s anonymous gossip board, and the caption says “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. 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.
What you might want to know about The Secret Place
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A year after a boy from a Dublin boys' boarding school is found dead on the lawn of the girls' school St. Kilda's, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey hands Cold Cases detective Stephen Moran a card from the school's anonymous board reading I know who killed him. He pulls in Antoinette Conway.
The Secret Place is the fifth book in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series. Like the others, it works as a standalone with its own narrator (here Stephen Moran) and case.
The Secret Place was a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Anthony Award. Tana French is one of the most-decorated mystery writers of her generation.
The Secret Place was written by Tana French, published in 2014 by Viking.
The Secret Place is 518 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Secret Place takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
The Secret Place is a standalone novel by Tana French, not part of a series.
The Secret Place is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
