In St. Kilda’s (Girls) School in Dublin, there is a bulletin board called the Secret Place where students can anonymously post notes that express their feelings. Detective Mackey’s daughter Holly Mackey, a student there, picks a message from that board and brings it to Detective Stephen Moran whom she knows and trusts from an earlier incident.

The message is a photo of another student Chris Harper--from the nearby school of St. Colms for Boys--whose recently murdered body was found on St. Kilda’s grounds. The photo has these words pasted on it that say "I know who killed him." This message is in neatly cut-up letters from a book.


Detective Moran has been working on the Cold Case Squad and he wants badly to get on the Murder Squad, which is a difficult group to be accepted in. Thinking, this may be his chance for entrance into the murder Squad, he takes the message to Detective Antoinette Conway, a new detective on the Murder Squad and the only woman there. In return, she lets him help her solve the case since she wants to solve this case badly to prove herself to the other sexist male detectives.

The two question several groups of girls in the school, listening to the accounts of the murder from each girl’s view. One group in which Holly belongs, has Becca, Selena, and Julia who are protective of one another. These girls have a rival group called the Daleks, four girls led by Joanne. Conway and Moran learn that Chris courted several girls at the same time or concurrently and gave each one a pink phone to call him in secret.

The detectives have several hurdles on their ways one of them is the administrator of the school who wants to close up the investigation to prevent further damage to St. Kilda’s name. Another is Frank Mackey, Holly’s father, and yet another is the students’ youth.

The story is told in back and forth fashion, covering the time of several months before the murder to the present day. The building of the plot is nothing short of mastery.

Each character is different, quirky, and complex, and the dialogue, especially with the exact way the teens talk, is jarring, yet brilliant. The search for the killer becomes more than that, adding to itself the themes of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, a woman’s struggle for acceptance at the workforce, and the exploration of the developing self in each character both in the members of the police and the students.

The story is brilliant and I don’t mind the back and forth style of telling it; however, making the last chapter to belong to the past threw me off, and I found out that several other people in Goodreads had the same problem.

seeing how any genre can be lifted up into being literary as well as obeying its ground rules.

the characters, every one of them.

that the last chapter showed the girls relationships from much earlier because I thought it was showing the year following the story, which didn't make sense. I think the last chapter should be the closing and not the beginning. In the quest for originality, a reader's understanding shouldn't be challenged like that.

is Tana French, the New York Times bestselling author of In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, The Secret Place, The Trespasser, and The Witch Elm. Her books have won awards including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She lives in Dublin with her family.

the story, together with its characters and plot, is very good.

This is an excellent book, which could do without that last chapter.
Maybe I am wrong, but the author could do better with that by at least indicating that the chapter belonged to the past.
Because of that last chapter, I am rating it four stars.

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Created Jun 24, 2019 at 5:18pm • Submit your own review...