Great coming-of-age drama.

Tana French's books are a matter of taste. Ostensibly, nothing much happens and who is looking for breathless action, which should certainly take another book to hand. For French, the inner lives of the characters, their psychology and their linkages with their respective environments is in the village of story.
These aspects she describes this resonate in the reader long with rare intensity and creation of images and associations. The moods they create through this Endringlichkeit capture and captivate so much that you have to put the book time and again aside to digest the intensity of the last read.

So it is in "The Secret Place", which reminded me of some places -in positive senses- on "The Likeness", my previous favorite book of Tana French.
Here meets the investigators -Steven Moran, known from "The Faithful Place" - a tight-knit community that apparently conceals a secret. Again, this mystery gnaws at the souls of the protagonists and increases their anguish finally to the point where only one change can bring relief.
Until that happens, the need -both from the working class stammenden- detectives with the intrigues of the daughters of the better-off deal, which gives them is not easy. Quote Moran: "Posh girls's school I'd've thought, if I'd thought.Beats a council estate where buses will not go But I was starting to see it, out of the corner of my eye. The shimmer in The Air That Says Danger. "
Maybe wearing French at Joanne Heffernan's clique in some places a little too thick to (OMG !!), but the awakening personalities of Holly and your girlfriends and the complex relationship among themselves portrayed so aptly.
I read in another review that Teeanager were not as Complex not, as described here. I beg to differ. At the battle with himself, the question who you are and to its place in society I still remember very well, even if the back is already for 30 years. Much of this can be found in this book again.
A notable example is, after all, in formal terms and the change of perspective through which the readers of the resolution of the case on the one hand from the perspective of the investigators -geschildert in real-time, approaches to others by way of flashbacks in the final months before the crime from the perspective of students. The Atmoshäre will seem hierduch denser and denser until the air to burn almost.

This is one of those rare books where one is sad when reading pleasure after the last page is finished.