The mesmerizing fourth novel of the Dublin murder squad by New York Times bestselling author Tana French.
Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, the brash cop from Tana French’s bestselling Faithful Place, plays by the book and plays hard. That’s what’s made him the Murder squad’s top detective—and that’s what puts the biggest case of the year into his hands.
On one of the half-built, half-abandoned “luxury” developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children are dead. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care.
At first, Scorcher and his rookie partner, Richie, think it’s going to be an easy solve. But too many small things can’t be explained. The half dozen baby monitors, their cameras pointing at holes smashed in the Spains’ walls. The files erased from the Spains’ computer. The story Jenny told her sister about a shadowy intruder who was slipping past all the locks.
And Broken Harbor holds memories for Scorcher. Seeing the case on the news sends his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family one summer at Broken Harbor, back when they were children.
With her signature blend of police procedural and psychological thriller, French’s new novel goes full throttle with a heinous crime, creating her most complicated detective character and her best book yet.
About Tana French
Tana French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the US and Malawi, and has lived in Dublin since 1990. She trained as a professional actress at Trinity College, Dublin, and has worked in theatre, film and voiceover.
Editorial Review
The Irish author continues to distinguish herself with this fourth novel, marked by psychological acuteness and thematic depth. As has previously been the case, a supporting character from a prior work (Faithful Place, 2010, her third and best) takes center stage, as Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy attempts to penetrate the mystery of what transpired during a night that left a husband and two children dead and a wife barely clinging to life, with injuries that couldn’t have been self-inflicted. Or could they? This is the most claustrophobic of French’s novels, because the secrets seemingly lie within that household and with those who were either murdered or attacked within it. The setting is an upscale property development at what had once been Broken Harbor, where Kennedy’s family had itself suffered a fatal trauma decades earlier. The property development has been left unfinished due to the economic downturn, which had also cost Patrick Spain his job. He and his wife, Jenny, had done their best to keep up appearances, with their marriage seemingly in harmony. Then came the attack that left Patrick and their two children dead and Jenny in intensive care. The investigative net cast by Kennedy and his younger partner encompasses Jenny’s sister and some of their longtime friends, but the focus remains on the insular family. Had Patrick gone insane? Had Jenny? Was this a horrific murder-suicide or had someone targeted a family that had no apparent enemies? Says Scorcher, “In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order.” Yet Scorcher’s own sanity, or at least his rigid notions of right and wrong, will fall into question in a novel that turns the conventional notions of criminals and victims topsy-turvy. – Kirkus Reviews
A Trip Down Memory Lane Leads to a Dead End at a Grisly Crime Scene
The New York Times Book Review – July 18, 2012 (Excerpt)
What a pretty picture: an Irish seaside community of 250 new houses built for lucky, happy families. In the evenings the aroma of home cooking fills the air. Commuters return from work. Gleaming cars fill driveways. Children play in the glow of streetlights. Husbands and wives talk in privacy, because these houses are well built. How could neighbors overhear them through such solid walls?
This community, called Brianstown, is at the heart of Tana French’s devious, deeply felt psychological chiller “Broken Harbor.” The place is nothing but a pipe dream. Brianstown is actually a half-built ghost town that bears scant resemblance to its idealized version in sales brochures — a grim monument to an Irish housing boom gone bust. Everything about it is dishonest, even the name. The place was called Broken Harbor before somebody decided Brianstown sounded better.
According to Scorcher Kennedy, the novel’s hard-charging main character, “Broken” is derived from “breacadh,” the Gaelic word for dawn. But we know what it really means. In three earlier books (“In the Woods,” “The Likeness”and the best of the bunch, “Faithful Place”) Ms. French created haunting, damaged characters who have been hit hard by some cataclysm. Her new book’s characters are like that too.
The author uses the nifty trick of extracting a secondary character from each book to narrate the one that follows. Scorcher appeared in “Faithful Place” as a colleague of its main character, a fellow Dublin detective named Frank Mackey. “He wore his swagger as part of his El Snazzo suit,” Ms. French wrote of Scorcher then. But his bravado is put to the test by the events “Broken Harbor” has in store. [Read the full article...]
A look at mind-bending murder in ‘Broken Harbor’
The Washington Post Book Review – July 22, 2012 (Excerpt)
Tana French’s new novel begins as a police procedural and evolves into a psychological thriller of exceptional complexity and depth.
At the outset, two Dublin detectives, the veteran Mick Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie Curran, are summoned to a horrific crime scene in a failed housing development near Broken Harbor, outside Dublin. Patrick Spain and his two small children are dead, and his wife, Jenny, is in critical condition. The children were smothered in their beds; the husband and wife were found in the kitchen with multiple stab wounds. Numerous holes in the walls of the house and an animal trap in the attic complicate the mystery.
The wife survives but cannot speak for several days as the detectives struggle to discover who attacked the family and why. Lacking evidence of forced entry or robbery, they see at least three possibilities: Either the wife or the husband could have attacked the others, or some third party might have entered their home with murderous intent.
The holes and the trap are a secondary puzzle. It emerges that sensible, well-liked Patrick had become convinced that he heard a small animal entering his attic and menacing his family. We don’t know for a long time whether this creature actually existed, if Patrick’s obsession with it was a sign of mental breakdown, or if someone was causing the noises to drive him mad. [Read the full article...]
Haunting Memories, Elaborate Plotting In ‘Harbor’
NPR Book Review – July 26, 2012 (Excerpt)
Home is everything. It’s where we come from and where we run to, wanting to start anew. But it’s also that place we can’t escape, the one that’s so much a part of us that no matter how old we get, it’s impossible to erase its presence from our memories, our bodies.
Brianstown, on the outskirts of Dublin, will always be Broken Harbor to Detective Mick Kennedy in Tana French’s emotionally gripping novel of the same name. It doesn’t matter how many superficial face-lifts it goes through or the half-built condominiums that spring up, promising an equally flashy lifestyle. It remains Broken Harbor.
Kennedy, known by his mates around the station as “Scorcher,” might have the second highest solve rate in Dublin’s murder squad — the unit around which French’s series (this is the fourth installment) is loosely based — but beneath the bravado is an obsessive struggle to succeed. The nickname came from football but morphed to fit Scorcher’s fanatical dedication to police work. He even uses it in the first-person: “Forty-eight hours, four solves. Now there’s a scorcher. I understand how many people would call that sick, and I understand why but that doesn’t change the fact: you need me.” [Read the full article...]
Writer Finds Her Niche in Dark Themes
The New York Times Book Review – August 26, 2012 (Excerpt)
DUBLIN — The identity of the murderer in Tana French’s thriller “Broken Harbor” is concealed, of course, until the end. But in some ways the killer is there all along, in the form not of a person but of a house — a malevolent family house rotting in a half-empty development begun in the Irish boom in the 2000s and all but abandoned in the subsequent crash.
“The place was starting to get to me,” the narrator, a detective in Dublin’s fictional Murder Squad, says after seeing it for the first time, filled with the blood and corpses of its inhabitants. “Something about the holes in the walls, maybe, or the unblinking cameras; or about all that glass, all those skeleton houses staring in at us, like famine animals circled around the warmth of a fire.”
“Broken Harbor” is Ms. French’s fourth book, and though it is a psychological thriller with grisly murders to solve and troubled police officers to solve them, it is also a state-of-the-nation novel, a portrait of a wrecked Ireland consuming itself within. No. 17 on the New York Times best-seller list for Sept. 2, it has drawn praise for its elegant writing as much as for its clever plot. “She has irresistibly sly ways of toying with readers’ expectations,” Janet Maslin wrote of the author in The New York Times. [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith. - 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
