“‘I’m the least fanciful guy around, but on nights when I wonder whether there was any point to my day, I think about this: the first thing we ever did, when we started turning into humans, was draw a line across the cave door and say: Wild stays out. What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire.'”
“Just about everything in this life is treacherous, ready to twist and shape-shift at any second; it seemed to me that the whole world would be a different place if you had someone you were certain of, certain to the bone, or if you could be that to someone else.”
Guys, I’m obsessed with Tana French. I don’t know if you can tell. I’ve given all of her books 4.5 stars or higher. Something about the way she writes about feelings and regret and humanity and just EVERYTHING, gets to me. It’s like, you know how sometimes authors describe the process of writing like opening a vein? That’s how I feel about Tana French, except in reverse. Instead of opening up her own veins, she’s the one opening mine. And I’m like, goddamn, lady, I JUST HAD THIS CARPET CLEANED.
Broken Harbor, like the previous Faithful Place, had a narrator I didn’t much care for, but as in Faithful Place, French makes that character and his flaws not only work for her, but she makes them the whole point. This time around we’ve got Scorcher Kennedy, the detective who got screwed out of the solve in Faithful Place. I would say he got screwed by detectives Frank Mackey and Stephen Moran, but I think it’s more accurate to say he actually got screwed by his own black and white view of the world. He was convinced that the wrong guy did it, and now he’s paying the price. Scorcher (whose real name is Mick) hasn’t had a big case assigned to him since he biffed the last one, but he’s handed a case that could salvage his reputation, and from the outside, it seems like a slam dunk.
On a ghost estate outside Dublin, the Spain family is found murdered. Two children under five, and a husband are dead. The wife is near death. But weird inconsistencies keep popping up that the easy solve can’t explain away. Scorcher’s rookie partner, Richie, is a sharp young guy, and the two soon find they work well together. But the case starts eating away at everything, including and especially Scorcher, whose sister Dina is mentally ill, and who has a history with the ghost estate in Brianstown, which used to be called Broken Harbour when Scorcher and his family vacationed there when he was a kid.
At the beginning of this book, it felt like the most bog-standard murder mystery French had written yet, and that turned out to be very much on purpose, because this book is at its heart is about the stuff you can’t see, what’s hidden underneath the veneer of civilization, about what it takes to push someone over the edge. Of madness that can touch you without warning, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The same reason I have such a hard time with Scorcher as a person is the reason I find him fascinating as a character. He’s the kind of guy who is hardwired to believe the world works a certain way and is totally unbending in the face of evidence to the contrary. And that’s exactly why he’s the perfect Target for French’s particular brand of psychological agony. Those kind of people are the ones who fall the hardest.
[4.5 stars]
