My first Tana French book was Into the Woods, which I read early in my freshman year of high school. (It probably would've been more age-appropriate if I had read The Secret Place then and Into the Woods now, but I digress.)

In all honesty, I liked Into the Woods better — perhaps part of it is that I liked that book so much when I first read it, but it seems that it had more sympathetic characters, a more suspenseful mystery, less obvious developments.

Which is not to say that I didn't like The Secret Place! The backdrop is pretty much exactly my elementary-school fantasy of boarding school, and the narrative epitomizes "There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls" — the edgier (so to speak) side of female adolescence, being young and underestimated and self-diagnosed as invincible.