Broken Harbor

Broken Harbor
By Tana French
2012
Viking
450 pages
ISBN: 978-0-670-02365-3
Cincinnati Public Library

Tana French's "Dublin Murder Squad" series isn't a true series in the typical sense of the word. While all the books are murder mysteries set in Dublin and the surrounding area and investigated by members of the same police detective unit, each book is really a self-contained narrative. Throughout the series, French has taken one of the squad member characters from the previous book (some more minor than others) and made them the focal point (and the first person narrator) of the next mystery. While the largest connections are between the first two books, In the Woods and The Likeness, really any of the books in this "series" can be read on it's own without missing much in the way of background, and missing nothing at all in the way of critical information for the plot at hand. This is why I have continued reading these books as they come out rather than "waiting for the series to be finished" as I so often declare I must.

French is a great mystery writer, all her books match more traditional police procedural with psychological thriller to some degree, and Broken Harbor is no exception. There are certainly some flaws in this book, but none of them serious enough to even consider putting it down... I found myself arranging my days around having time to read this one.

In Broken Harbor, we are faced with the gruesome murder of almost an entire family in a creepy half-finished housing development that tanked halfway through construction in the economic collapse. The father and 2 children are dead, and the mother lies in critical condition.Oh, one more thing... The housing development just happens to be located on the spot where our narrator, Detective Mick Kennedy, spent his summer vacations as a child. And where his mother killed herself.

The mystery is a good one, with layers upon layers of deeply creepy and troubling complexity. It does suffer from the Law and Order syndrome: "That person that gets arrested halfway through the hour can't possibly be the murderer, or at least not the whole story, because there's still 30 minutes left." When a deeply creepy suspect is arrested fairly early in the book, you know that he's involved somehow, but also that he can't be the whole story, because there are a couple hundred pages left to solve the thing. Still, even knowing there must be one, I didn't see the final twist coming, and I really enjoyed getting there. I did think that a portion of the complexities of Detective Kennedy's family interactions were a distraction, but not so much that they took away from the central narrative. Nobody's perfect.

French however, has been closer to perfect in the past. While I do recommend this book to her fans and other mystery lovers, if you haven't already read her other books, I liked The Likeness far better than this one.