‘The Secret Place’: Deep dive into drama detracts from story

Fans of acclaimed mystery writer Tana French can be a bit, well, fanatical about her work. I should know. I'm one of them.

And while her latest novel, 'The Secret Place,” delivers on a number of French's trademarks - a complex murder, a literary bent, crisp Irish dialogue - she dives a bit too deeply into the world of teen drama, ballooning a potentially beautiful novel into a misshapen tome.

We begin, of course, with a murder. A young man from an elite Irish boarding school is found dead on the grounds of the neighboring girls' school, and a year passes with no arrests. Enter Detective Stephen Moran from the Cold Cases department with a new clue that is literally handed to him out of the blue. He teams up with Homicide Detective Antoinette Conway, a brash, friendless woman who puts Moran through his paces.

The book alternates between the detective's current-day pursuit and the perspective of two groups of boarding school girls, whose storyline begins a year previous to the murder.

While the relationship between the detectives is complex and nicely paced (there is an especially nice twist involving a suspect's father), the teenage storyline is rife with the minute of teen drama. Chapters are packed with long discussions of wearing jeans to a dance and meandering pseudo-philosophical conversations which, used sparingly, would be lovely. But with eight girls and so many deviations, the novel becomes disjointed and unnecessarily long.

There is also the matter of smaller storylines - such as four of the girls suddenly possessing telekinetic powers - that are quickly introduced and then, just as needlessly, dropped, leaving readers to wonder why French chose to include them at all.

The most fanatical of Tana French fans may say there can never be too much Tana French, but her latest book may have some readers thinking otherwise.