Tana French, The Secret Place (2014)

A Dublin police procedural, set almost entirely on the grounds of a posh private girls' boarding school where a handsome but flirty and selfish boy called Chris (from a neighbouring boys' school) has been found with his head bashed-in. The murder weapon was a hoe from the groundskeeper's hut, but the groundskeeper has an alibi. The murder was investigated, not solved, and so shelved. A year later, on a noticeboard in the school called 'the secret place' (a board on which people post anonymous messages of the 'I stole your cake!' 'I fancy so-and-so', 'I hate so-and-so', 'I want a boob-job' sort, a pressure-valve for the high strung schoolgirls) a person or persons unknown has put up a card that reads—you can see it on the cover, up there—'I know who killed him'. This restarts the murder investigation. Ambitious young Stephen Moran, our narrator for half the tale, is handed the card; he gets together with ball-busting Murder Squad detective Antoinette Conway. They go to the school. 500+ pages later the mystery is solved.

That's one problem, there. The novel really doesn't need half a thousand pages to tell its story. The prose is well-formed and readable, the dialogue (including a pleasingly high number of uses of that splendid Irish word 'bollix') mostly lively, the class tensions well drawn, and the murder absorbing. But it all goes on too, too long. There are far too many repeated scenes of the detectives interviewing teenage girls, too much (I'm sorry to use the word, but) padding to do with seeming apparitions of the ghost of Chris. The intention I'm guessing is to paint the closeted high-strung world of the girls' boarding school with some of the hues of Miller's The Crucible; but although French strains pretty much every pip in her writing to achieve this, it simply doesn't come off. Feels told rather than shown, not helped by French leaning too heavily on the 'ohmygod!' 'that's totes freaky', 'um, hello, like, actually I didn't kill him, alright?', 'whatevs' idiom for her central group of girls. I'm not saying this is badly observed, where teenage girls are concerned; only that this idiolect becomes monotonous in such a large dose, and that this monotony is aesthetically counter-productive.

There's one other element in the tale, but the fact that I've left it to this last brief paragraph indicates its semi-detached relationship to the rest of the novel. Interleaved with the police procedural chapters are flashback chapters in which the main group of friends bond over midnight trips to a nearby field, and discover they have actual magic powers. This 'fantastika' element is worked-in to the solution, but never felt very real to me. It needs to be uncanny and unnerving; but it reads more like a blander version of that 1996 movie The Craft.