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** Spoilers below **

I think the important thing about going into this book is to not expect it to be a murder mystery - there is a harrowing death which precipitates the story and which serves as a motivating force for the protagonist, 12 year old Harriet - but while she's on a search to find and punish the perpetrator, the book itself isn't.

Instead, what we have here is a tricksy narrative where we as readers see beyond Harriet's childhood understandings, and I'd say the main thrust of the book is her introduction to an adult world which is more cruel, less resolved, even more arbitrary than the essentially benign and ordered world that Harriet imagines based on her reading of books like Treasure Island. In Tartt's version, children may go on adventures but they also may get things wrong, create mayhem, cause hurt, even - perhaps - be implicated in killings that they never intended.

Along the way, Harriet also learns some hard home truths - that Ida, her beloved Black nanny and housekeeper, doesn't love her back. That her domestic world is built on inherited racism that feeds all the way down to her own parents who don't allow Ida to drink out of the same glasses as the family. That prejudices of class can skew her own conclusions and that someone involved in a meths lab might want to get away from his own lifestyle and might once have been 'the little friend'.

For all the good stuff, the book is overlong and can feel directionless for a large part. I especially felt that long chapters following the snake-handling preacher (word of warning: lots of snakes here, including one horrific, if blackly comic, scene of a cobra being dropped into a topless car from a bridge...) and the Ratcliff family with their criminal enterprises disrupt the main narrative and I yearned to be back with Harriet and her family.

There are lots of Southern tropes here: the generations of men-less women in Harriet's family, racism, classism, poverty, drugs, religion - and yes, all those snakes! In the end, I liked this more as a whole than I did during some of the chapters and it's Tartt's fluent writing and dark, dark sense of humour which kept me going.

For what it's worth, my take on Robin? (view spoiler)[I think he died by accident, trying to 'fly' from the tree and got caught in the rope which strangled him. There are so many instances of people wanting to fly, dreaming of flying, including Alison's nightmares of flying. There are also mentions of Houdini's escapes, something that Robin can't manage, and Harriet's own self-suffocation as she tries to hold her breath in imitation of Houdini. The adults all know this, otherwise it's hard to believe that they wouldn't have been agitating for further police investigations, and there's no mention (I think) in the newspaper archives which Harriet is reading of this being an unsolved murder. The whole book, then, is built on Harriet's misunderstanding about Robin's death as well as her leap in error to who the perpetrator is. (hide spoiler)]