Since his turn as Frank Mackey's sidekick in The Faithful Place, Detective Stephen Moran has been biding his time working in Cold Cases, hoping to get into the elite Dublin Murder Squad. He gets a lucky break in the form of Mackey's daughter, Holly, who attends the prestigious girls' boarding school St. Kilda's. She shows up at the station one day with a card with the words "I know who killed him" glued across a picture of Chris Harper, a popular boy who was found dead on the campus of St. Kilda's months ago.
Moran talks his way into the investigation alongside Detective Antoinette Conway; Moran's likability and optimism make him the perfect good cop to Conway's cynical, bullish bad cop. As they face down a tight-lipped headmistress, a bevy of teen girls and a ticking clock before they're shoved off the school grounds, Moran and Conway must learn to trust each other if they're going to catch a killer.
Tana French expertly portrays the raw and shaky world of adolescence. With carefully crafted characters and motives, she not only makes a boarding school murder seem plausible, she makes the reader wonder how teenagers could ever live in such close quarters without doing each other grievous bodily harm. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads