The sun-lit lounge of Dublin’s Westbury Hotel seems an unlikely place to discuss murder most foul. But as fans of Tana French will know, the Irish crime novelist has an unerring ability to imbue the most unlikely places with menace. Luckily for patrons and Hot Press, it is not the Westbury itself — the latest heinous backdrop, as featured in new novel The Secret Place, is a private girls boarding school on Dublin’s southside. A year previously, the body of 16-year-old Christopher Harper was discovered in the grounds of St. Kilda’s. When Holly Mackey, a St. Kilda’s pupil, brings Detective Stephen Moran a postcard suggesting someone in the school knows the identity of the killer, Moran sees his chance of joining the elite Dublin murder squad.

The Secret Place published by Viking Adult is out now