Publication: THE SECRET PLACE by Tana French

Her first offering since the superb, award-winning BROKEN HARBOUR (2012), Tana French’s latest novel is THE SECRET PLACE (Hodder & Stoughton), a typically quirky police procedural set in an exclusive Dublin boarding school for girls. To wit:

The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago.
  The caption says, ‘I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM’.
  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.
  Solving this case could take Stephen onto the Murder squad. But to get it solved, he will have to work with Detective Antoinette Conway - tough, prickly, an outsider, everything Stephen doesn’t want in a partner. 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.

  For all the details, clickety-click here …

Secrets And Lies

A first glimpse, courtesy of Amazon US, of the cover of Tana French’s forthcoming novel, THE SECRET PLACE (Hachette), which I’ve been looking forward to ever since I finished her last offering, the wonderful BROKEN HARBOUR, which won the LA Times’ Best Mystery / Thriller award. The set-up runs as follows:

The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls’ boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption says ‘I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM’.
  Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin’s Murder Squad—and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. “The Secret Place,” a board where the girls at St. Kilda’s School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why.
  But everything they discover leads them back to Holly’s close-knit group of friends and their fierce enemies, a rival clique—and to the tangled web of relationships that bound all the girls to Chris Harper. Every step in their direction turns up the pressure. Antoinette Conway is already suspicious of Stephen’s links to the Mackey family. St. Kilda’s will go a long way to keep murder outside their walls. Holly’s father, Detective Frank Mackey, is circling, ready to pounce if any of the new evidence points toward his daughter. And the private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined.
  THE SECRET PLACE is a powerful, haunting exploration of friendship and loyalty, and a gripping addition to the Dublin Murder Squad series.

  THE SECRET PLACE will be published on August 28th …

Phew! It’s Tana French’s Scorcher …

I have no idea if the image on your right will be the official cover for Tana French’s BROKEN HARBOUR, but I kind of hope it is - it’s all very dramatic, indeed, and pretty timely in terms of where we are in Ireland, with storm clouds overhead and the waves crashing up onto the shores.
  Anyway, the novel isn’t due until next June (boo), but it will feature a minor character from Tana’s previous / current offering, FAITHFUL PLACE, one Scorcher Kennedy, and the blurb elves have been busy already, with their combined best efforts reading a lot like this:

In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder Squad’s star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once. Scorcher’s personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk …

  Can’t wait to see this one. And with Conor Fitzgerald’s THE NAMESAKE and Adrian McKinty’s THE COLD COLD GROUND already on the way, Laurence O’Bryan’s THE ISTANBUL PUZZLE due in January, and the perennial offering from John Connolly in the shape of THE ANGELS OF WRATH, 2012 is shaping up to be yet another cracking year for Irish crime fiction …

There’s No PLACE Like Home

Boo. I was under the impression that Tana French’s new novel, BROKEN HARBOUR, was due later this summer, but my ever-reliable moles in the industry (aka a quick squint at Amazon) tells me that BROKEN HARBOUR won’t be appearing until next March.
  That said, there’s a lot of Tana French around at the moment, most of it celebrating the release of the paperback of FAITHFUL PLACE, with Michael Malone leading the charge over at May Contain Nuts. An excerpt runs thusly:

MM: Your bio reads that you spent much of your childhood travelling - has this impacted on your ability to have a “Faithful Place” of your own?

TF: “I think my international-brat childhood played a big part in shaping FAITHFUL PLACE. You’re always fascinated by what’s alien and inaccessible to you, and I’ve always been fascinated by people and places whose roots go deep – people who are part of a centuries-old, tight-knit community where every relationship is shaped by generations’ worth of interaction and knowledge. That’s not something I’ll ever have, and that’s the world where FAITHFUL PLACE is set: the Liberties, an inner-city neighbourhood that’s one of Dublin’s oldest.
  “At the same time, though, Dublin is the nearest thing I’ve got to a home. I’ve lived here since 1990; it’s the only city I know inside out, all the accents, all the short cuts, the sense of humour and the best pubs. In a lot of ways FAITHFUL PLACE is a love song to Dublin, with all its flaws.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, over at Milo’s Rambles, Tana French is interviewed by, erm, Tana French. You know what to do …
  Finally, the inestimable Shotsmag has an intriguing piece, again from Tana, in which she offers her five favourite novels that deal with blood ties. One click and you’re there …

This World Is Mostly Broken

Tana French (right) is having a hell of a year. We’re still not halfway through, and already she’s been nominated for an LA Times Book Award, an Edgar and an Anthony, all for FAITHFUL PLACE. Nice work, with her latest offering, BROKEN HARBOUR, to come in August.
  Tana, of course, makes a virtue of pulling a minor character from a previous novel into the spotlight with her latest, and BROKEN HARBOUR will follow in the stumbling footsteps of ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, who played a supporting role in FAITHFUL PLACE. So wot’s BROKEN HARBOUR all about then? Quoth Tana, from her contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS:

“It’s set somewhere out past Balbriggan [north County Dublin], on one of those half-built ‘ghost estates’, one of the quarter-inhabited ones. A family has been attacked and the father and two children are dead, the mother’s in intensive care and Scorcher, who is still not one hundred per cent back in everyone’s good books after making a mess of the case in FAITHFUL PLACE, has been assigned this case with his rookie partner. And of course, it ends up getting tangled up with Scorcher’s own personal life because Scorcher’s got a history with this location in this previous incarnation – before it was an estate, it was a place where people went on their summer holidays. He’s got a bit of history there and what with that and everything else, the case sucks him in.”

  So there you have it: another slice of thoughtful social commentary wrapped up in beautiful prose which excavates the dark secrets of a psychologically complex anti-hero as a metaphor for a broken country. Easy when you know how, eh?