The story is told in the first person by Murder Detective Mick Kennedy.  Kennedy has a young rookie offsider Murder Detective Richie Curran.  The pair are called to Brainstown - a housing development at Broken Harbour that was never completed.  The houses stand derelict; only a few were sold.  In one of the houses a family the father, Pat (recently out of work); mother, Jenny; children, Emma and Jack are found murdered but one may survive.

Murder Detective Kennedy’s family holidayed at Broken Harbour when they were children.  He is haunted; his mother killed herself there and his baby sister (now a woman) never psychologically recovered.  He has his own demons to fight. Murder Detective Richie Curran has his own inner conflicts.  Kennedy and Curran apprehend a suspect for the murders; he is in the right place, ticks all the boxes for the murders and confesses to the crimes but Curran doesn’t feel right about it; he doesn’t think he did it.  The story is first class; the plot is superb, the dialogue is cracking, and the intrigue is riveting BUT it is far too long.  So many times I felt like I was ploughing through it.  I felt the novel could have been condensed and it would have added to the quality for a fast paced story.  Don’t miss reading it though because Tana French is a great writer and it is a cracker story.

Like French herself, who takes so much care to explain the events leading up to each crime, our detective, Mick Kennedy (called “Shockey”), is as interested in finding out the “why” behind a crime as he is in discovering the “how.” For Shockey, finding a reason for the crime is symbolic: he needs to know there is, in a fact, a reason for why things happen. His schizophrenic sister, Dina, for whom he has cared nearly his entire life, challenges Shockey when she tells him, “There is no why.”  When he is asked to solve the triple homicide of a family in the same city where his mother killed herself when he was sixteen (the titular Broken Harbour), Shockey’s desperation to find reasons behind the crime almost derails the entire investigation.

The family is the seemingly idyllic Spain family. Pat and Jenny Spain have been together since they were teenagers, and now, in their newly-purchased home in Broken Harbour, they hope to raise their two children, Emma and Jack, in the safe folds of the same love that has kept the two of them together all this time. This hope is destroyed when, one night, Emma and Jack are smothered in their beds, and Pat and Jenny are found stabbed and clinging to each other in a pond of blood on the kitchen floor. Jenny is barely alive and has no memories of what happened that night.

On his first walk through the crime scene, Shockey’s new, young partner, Richie, suggests that the family could have been attacked by a psychopath with no real motive. But this doesn’t fit with Shockey’s experience or his worldview. Even psychopaths have their logic, reasons Shockey, even if we don’t understand it. In Shockey’s experience, there’s hardly a person who’s been murdered who didn’t invite it into their lives one way or another. There is always a why.

Broken Harbour trades off some of the careful character development of French’s first three novels in exchange for more of a crime procedural type of novel. This isn’t a complaint: French does crime procedural very well, and for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing,  the descriptions of the details involved in the crime scene, the autopsy, the witness and suspect questioning, etc., are hugely fun reading. But for the first 100 pages, we have little to no sense of Shockey’s background, or where his drive for solving murders comes from. Dina, his sister, provides an element of chaos in his otherwise exceedingly regimented life, but we learn that the real source of Shockey’s need for certainty and order comes from the suicide of his mother. She walked into Broken Harbour and let herself drown while the family was on vacation. The questions this event raises in Shockey’s mind– Why did she do it? What was she thinking? Was there anything I could have done?– are all questions that apply equally to the Spain case. Why would anyone want to murder two happily married, popular, beautiful people, and their two young children? An investigation into their private lives finds that aside from Pat having lost his job recently and money being tight as a result, the Spains were involved in nothing that can explain why they might have been targeted. Though Shockey is not as vibrant a character as Cassie Maddox in French’s excellent The Likeness, and the Spains aren’t as thoughtfully drawn as  the dysfunctional Mackeys in Faithful Place, Shockey is someone we can recognize from the real world: a man who doesn’t know how to trust or be close to anyone, and believes that this is in fact the best way to live. It gives him what he believes is control. He believes it makes him a better cop than he would otherwise be.

This control is threatened by the youthful innocence of his new partner, Richie. Richie has a gift Shockey does not: he gets witnesses and suspects to talk. To someone like Shockey, though, who has takes pains to separate himself from people as much as possible, the wonder of Richie’s talent is in its results, and not its origin. He believes that Richie has a knack for making people feel comfortable, and it doesn’t occur to him until much later that this is because Richie actually sees witnesses and suspects as people. Nonetheless, Richie’s talent as a detective and his sympathetic ear awaken yearnings in Shockey to have a real friend, to possibly confide in Richie, and the possibility of Shockey’s for once making a real connection is one way in which the reader can relate to him.

Shockey’s mission to solve the Spain case and maintain his belief that the world follows rules meets with only mixed success, but French’s novels have never come with unambiguously cheery endings. In her books, the protagonist always ends up returning to the physical location of some past painful event, and in doing so re-opening a wound that hasn’t healed. Though for the characters, the return to these locations can be painful, for us readers, it is a pleasure to return to French’s world and find a good story waiting for us, same as last time.

*I received an Advanced Reader’s Copy of Tana French’s Broken Harbour through a Goodreads giveaway.

Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is fantastic, and Broken Harbour is no exception.  Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy may have been burned by Detective Frank Mackey in Faithful Place  when he tried ally with Mackey in hopes of  making a name for himself, but as the featured detective in this novel, he knocks it out of the park. When a family is brutally attacked in their home and the wife barely survives, Kennedy takes on the defining case of his career that  parallels his struggles with his bipolar sister.

Broken Harbour combined my favorite elements of French’s past novels.  Her mysteries are particularly fascinating because she narrows the field of suspects to two or three real suspects.  Here, French gives us an in depth character study of the husband, wife and their childhood friend.  You become emotionally invested in the potential suspects, and most importantly – this is no bait and switch.  There’s no random stranger or undiscovered evidence that comes in at the end and let’s everyone off the hook.  Someone you care about deeply about by the end of the story will be the killer, which only heightens the emotional impact.

Continue reading…

My Rating – 5/5

Summary –

On a summer evening in 1984, three best friends; Peter Savage, Jamie Rowan and Adam Ryan, 12 year olds from the neighbourhood of Knocknaree near Dublin went in the woods to play. But Peter and Jamie never came back. Adam was found later with slashes across his T-shirt and his boots filled with blood with no memory of horror that may have happened. Twenty years later, 12 year old Katy Devlin is found dead in the same woods. Investigating the case is detective Rob Ryan, the 12 year old survivor. Every clue takes him back In The Woods, something that he has tried very hard to forget. Are the two events linked? Is there a serial killer lurking in Knocknaree? Will Rob be able to exorcise the ghosts of his past?

Review –

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!! Now I know why bloggers across the world are head over heels with Tana French. Sure, I had read The Likeness (and that’s why bought In The Woods), so had a fairly good idea of what will be coming. But In The Woods still succeeded in taking me by complete surprise. It has a superb plot backed by solid narration. It is very difficult for me to say what really clicks because there are so many things and I just can’t place my finger on one.

French has an amazing style and she is wonderful in crafting her characters and the setting. Through small details, traits and mannerisms every character emerges with its own distinct personality. The chemistry between Rob and his partner Cassie is particularly fantastic to read. It is like watching a skilled pair of figure skaters performing intricate moves while deftly manoeuvring across the ring. Their colleague Sam O’Neill is chivalrous, dogged and well mannered. And I just loved Cassie. She is clear headed, conscientious and gritty. After The Likeness, I was very eager to know more about her. She tries her best to save Rob from going downhill. Rob who is narrator of the story is torn between his deep desire to know the truth and his equally vehement attempts to shut himself out from the horrors of the past. His every move attracts him back to Knocknaree and leads to a nervous breakdown.

It is difficult to talk about the plot without spilling the beans. So I will stay away from it. The mystery is a complete whodunit. As Rob and Cassie probe the murder of Katy Devlin, they learn that her common middle class family is not what it actually seems. The clues are there in plain sight and yet I overlooked every one of them.

The series is loosely connected and the books can be read independently. French has used a new narrator every time allowing her to experiment with style and giving each book a distinct identity. The next two books of the series Faithful Place (narrated by Frank Mackey, Cassie’s former undercover boss) and Broken Harbour (narrated by Scorcher Kennedy) are already out. But I am eager to read Sam’s story and equally hopeful that French will go back to Ryan’s unfinished story as well.

In The Woods is an incredibly good book and I would like to rate it more than 5 just for its characters and the atmosphere that French creates weaving their psychological upheavals with their surroundings. The spellbinding mystery raises it a notch higher.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate your time.

The book is available cheapest in India at -

1. Bookadda 2. Infibeam 3. Flipkart

My other Dublin Murder Squad series reviews -

1. The Likeness 2. Faithful Place

Broken Harbour¸ the latest psychological thriller by Irish novelist Tana French is as pitch-perfect as her other three books (Into the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place) and may very well be her most subtle and intense work.

As anyone who’s read her other novels knows, Tana French paradoxically makes Ireland both familiar and exotic.  Her descriptive powers give you the flavour and texture of Ireland, provide you with the scent of the air and the sound of the wind and make you feel as if you too share a history with the locations.  You feel like you know the landscape as intimately as you know your own hometown whether you’ve been to Ireland or not. But, Ireland is also a lovingly described exotic location, with a complex history and unique terms and sensibilities.  She captures the milieu of Ireland.  As well, her subtle integration of the boom and bust economic reality of Ireland into the plot and setting of her novels gives her narratives a layer of credibility and authenticity that is often missing in less complex novels.

Broken Harbour begins with Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy catching the Spain murder case and, to no surprise to readers familiar with Scorcher as the over-confident, slightly unimaginative, by-the-book detective who investigated the murders in Faithful Place, pronouncing himself the best detective for this horrific crime.  Taking a bit player from a previous novel and making him or her the narrator of the next novel is a Tana French hallmark, and here she masterfully connects Broken Harbour’s Kennedy to the Scorcher described in Faithful Place.

The true beauty of Broken Harbour is the way French integrates Kennedy’s own past into the narrative.  His relationship with his sisters, his own memories of Broken Harbour before it became the Brianstown housing estate where he investigates the murder of the Spain family, and the veiled hints to the case that was the centre of Faithful Place, all combine into a nuanced and carefully constructed narration.  French’s narrators are never completely reliable because they, like actual people, are influenced by their own prejudices and past experience; however, it’s only as the novel progresses that you realize just how much Kennedy’s own past and family influence how he investigates these murders.

Tana French is a master of intricate relationships.  The other, minor characters in Broken Harbour are well drawn and complex and their relationships with Kennedy and each other are believable and complicated.  Richie, as Kennedy’s new, green partner, is fascinating as a naturally intuitive rookie detective and all of the players in the murder from the victims to the suspects are multifaceted and interesting.  When the murderer is finally revealed, you can see the steps French used to get there, but at no point was it glaringly obvious.

The only flaw I can find with Broken Harbour has to do with Richie and Kennedy’s ultimate fate within the Murder Squad.  I felt Richie’s future was especially difficult to stomach, but his actions that lead up to that eventual fate were interesting and the results were not, even if unsatisfactory for a reader who felt close to this character, overly harsh.

Broken Harbour is a match for French’s other novels and I think, after rereading them all, could be her best work.  The relationships and characters are multilayered and extremely authentic.  The mystery at the heart of the novel isn’t easily solved and French’s Ireland provides a rich landscape for everything to play out.

Broken Harbour will be available at Books & Co in June 2012.