Secret Place

Another Goodreads reader indicated that this is the first of French's novels that didn't surpass the one before it in her estimation of its qualities. I'll differ with her a bit. Broken Harbour, with its odd pine martin creature story, never hooked me the way this did. Each of French's novels plays out tensions between the story line of the murder (who did it; how will we learn the facts?) and the story line of the Dublin murder squad detectives. Along the way, she weaves in juuuuust enough weird to make you sit up and take notice. I was a bit worried, at about the 1/3-through mark, that she'd lost me and we were back in weasel land, but her depiction of the all-girls' school and its pupils and the power–quite literally–of their friendships was just remarkable. She writes a good tale, that Tana French. Well done.