"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever tell." So says Richard Papen, youthful co-conspirator in a plot to slay a fellow classmate; this is the secret written history of the circumstance and effect of murder, a confession from inside the exalted halls of academe.

Papen counts himself fortunate, after some prompting, to be approved for the elite classics class at Hampden College, Vermont, and gradually gain the acceptance of his moneyed fellow students. Papen, reluctantly from a modest Californian family, is immediately set-apart from the others, for whom higher education is merely time-serving, but feels an intellectual kinship that binds them ever closer together and to their devoted, beloved professor, Julian Morrow. But soon Papen is aware of a shift in sympathies, some deep-seated group neurosis that grows out of their supposed erudition and immersion, and uncovers a terrible secret that, through mere expediency, necessitates the death of student Bunny Corcoran.

From the outset, Donna Tartt's celebrated debut impresses with its sheer bulk. The death of Bunny Corcoran takes almost half the running time, and at well over three hundred pages in itself, would add up to a fair sized novel in its own right. But at no time in her prose does Tartt give any indication of being forced to tell this tale; The Secret History has its own natural speed and unfolds accordingly. Indeed, such is the nature of this story that a steady, insinuating hand is more than required to successfully identify reader with event. In essence, therefore, for much of the first half of this book, nothing really happens beyond the machinations of college life, and yet so sure is Tartt that these episodes take on an urgency and narrative drive that hook and pull the reader toward its later revelations.

The latter half of the book unfolds in the aftermath of the murder, and has a markedly different approach. The arrogance of the conspirators towards the need for their crime is matched solely by the urgency on occasion with which they move to cover their tracks, only to see the seams begin to weaken as strains within the group emerge, from the internal tensions of the relationship between the Macaulay twins, to the friction inherent in the gay Francis, or the gradual collapse of nominal intellectual leader Henry. In addition, these sections are also curiously more humorous than before, albeit often very back, morbid; the complications of attending the funeral for the dead boy, or the murderers' mortification when they realise the nature of the movies chosen to be their alibi.

The key to Tartt's success lies in her ability to balance a narrative between intellectual prowess and galloping thriller, between the sarcastic and the expressly serious. The pacing is ferocious, the writing precise enough to do it more than justice, but without ever collapsing into literary excess at the expense of story it endeavours to tell. In the final analysis its sheer size does tend to militate against it (even if it is a fault only revealed in hindsight), but from the inside, The Secret History is cerebral, obsessive crime fiction of a very high order indeed.