The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #05)

From the multi-award-winning author of Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller In the Woods, The Secret Place is a searing novel of psychological suspense. 

"French's pitch-perfect prose nails teenage lives with uncanny precision and the result is that rare beast, a literary page-turner."  -   The Sunday Express (UK)

Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's sixteen and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story. Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets. The previous year, Christopher Harper, from the neighbouring boys' school, was found murdered on the grounds. And today, in the Secret Place - the school noticeboard where girls can pin up their secrets anonymously - Holly found the card. 

"Beyond the murder mystery, which leaves the reader in suspense throughout, the novel explores the mysteries of friendship, loyalty and betrayal, not only among adolescents but within the police force as well. Everyone in this meticulously crafted novel might be playing — or being played by — everyone else."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. And he will have to find a way into the strange, charged, mysterious world that Holly and her three closest friends inhabit and disentangle the truth from their knot of secrets, even as he starts to suspect that the truth might be something he doesn't want to hear.