The Secret Place by Tana French

What they say......"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.

What I Say.....Okay, the truly scary thing about this book is that I realized I may have the speech patterns of a 17 year old girl.  W....T....F.....?
But anyway....I've read one other book by Tana French, her first novel, "In The Woods", and I really liked it, but for some reason never sought out any other books by her.  However, when I got a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review, I found this book so good, that it made me want to go back and read the books in between.
The Secret Place made me think of the website Post Secret, which is compulsively readable but it's also complete emotional annihilation.  This book was also pretty emotionally draining, no one feels anything like a teenage girl feels it.  The magic was a nice touch, but then it seemed to fizzle out without any follow through.
I had pretty much figured out who the real killer was, but everyone was so integral to the murder, it could have been any of them, so you didn't get bored waiting for the mystery to be solved
Excellent story, my only complaint is that it was about 50-75 pages too long.  528 pages?  Ain't nobody got time for 'dat.
I give this a four stars - a great read.