A teenage girl shows up at the Dublin police station with an anonymous card that says that someone at her boarding school knows who really killed a student who was found dead on the school's campus a year before. She entrusts this message to a Cold Cases cop eager to make the Murder squad, and he jumps at the opportunity to work with the currently partner-less cop who headed up the case in the first place. He thinks it’ll be easy, but when he gets to the school he realizes he's forgotten how ruthless and cunning teenagers can be, especially in an isolated boarding school.
The present-day story is mixed in with scenes from the boarding school starting a few months before the student’s death, telling the story of the teenage girl and her friends as they interact with the student’s at her school and the school of the dead kid. The author drops in hints here and there about how the girls' actions and the actions of other students will eventually lead to Chris's death, but as always she keeps you wondering up to the end.
French's writing is poetic but gripping, and her characters are all completely believable and somehow sympathetic, even the ones who are kind of terrible people. She has written several other books about the Dublin Murder Squad, including In the Woods, and I highly recommend all of them to readers who love mysteries but want a little bit more than just plot in their stories.
--Alison McCarty, Callahan Branch Library
Find The Secret Place in the Nassau County Public Library System catalog.
The present-day story is mixed in with scenes from the boarding school starting a few months before the student’s death, telling the story of the teenage girl and her friends as they interact with the student’s at her school and the school of the dead kid. The author drops in hints here and there about how the girls' actions and the actions of other students will eventually lead to Chris's death, but as always she keeps you wondering up to the end.
French's writing is poetic but gripping, and her characters are all completely believable and somehow sympathetic, even the ones who are kind of terrible people. She has written several other books about the Dublin Murder Squad, including In the Woods, and I highly recommend all of them to readers who love mysteries but want a little bit more than just plot in their stories.
--Alison McCarty, Callahan Branch Library
Find The Secret Place in the Nassau County Public Library System catalog.