Cannonball Read 13

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> Genre: Fiction > …but the past ain’t through with you.

…but the past ain’t through with you.

Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad #4) by Tana French

January 27, 2021 by TylerDFC 10 Comments

Broken Harbor, by Tana French, is not a book. It is a jagged ball of glass that dazzles the eyes but draws blood as deftly as a razor blade.

Detectives Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, lead investigator of the Dublin Murder Squad, and his rookie partner Richie Curran are assigned a high profile murder case. A family of four, including two young children, have been brutally attacked in their home in the housing estate of Brianstown. Swift justice is called for and Kennedy’s close rate is the best in the squad, so the brass wants him on the case. Kennedy knows Brianstown by another name, Broken Harbor. In his childhood it was a small village where people would come for a holiday in the summer include Kennedy’s family. Until the one summer night that changed his family forever, and drove his younger sister Dina mad. As the investigation uncovers mystery after mystery, the detectives are lead on a chase for the truth that may destroy everyone involved as past and present collide.

Like all of the preceding Dublin Murder Squad novels, the mystery at the heart of the book is not as important as the impact it has on the characters. Tana French does not right parlor room mysteries. She writes psychological horror where a terrible crime traps the characters in a house of mirrors. By now it would be fair to think the reader could anticipate where French is taking them, but once again she proves herself a master at misdirection. To the unfamiliar, Broken Harbor appears to be just a hard-boiled crime procedural. Most of the action takes place in interview rooms and long conversations between the detectives, various experts, and the witnesses and victims. It is a testament to Tana French that she can layer these scenes with character details that build the growing sense of unease in the reader’s mind. There is a line at the end of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which coincidentally came out the same year as Broken Harbor, that chilled me to the bone and has stuck with me. As Nick Dunne goes to sleep next to his wife, Amy, he describes it as “It’s like sleeping with a spider.” That is the feeling I had reading Broken Harbor. It’s a deceptive book that appears to be telling one story before you realize at the end it was another one the whole time.

I white-knuckled through the last 100 pages staying up late, then forgoing work the next day to finish it. I had to be done, I needed to put it behind me. Which is the way I always feel at the end of a Tana French novel. She is one of my favorite writers, but I cannot read her more than once a year it seems. Her ability to create characters that feel completely human, and then show how easily their lives can be torn apart, is remarkable. And horrifying. The moral takeaway from most of her stories is the smallest things can ultimately lead to downfall. So much of what we take for granted as firm and strong scaffolding in our lives such as our jobs, our families, our friends, our society, even our mind, are really nothing more than ice castles. When a strong enough light shines on them it shows how fragile they really are just before it all melts away.

 

“Here’s what I’m trying to tell you: this case should have gone like clock-work. It should have ended up in the textbooks as a shining example of how to get everything right. By every rule in the book, this should have been the dream case.” from Broken Harbor.

Filed Under: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense Tagged With: broken harbor, dublin murder squad, mystery, Tana French, thriller, TylerDFC

TylerDFC's CBR13 Review No:1 · Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense · Tags: broken harbor, dublin murder squad, mystery, Tana French, thriller, TylerDFC ·
Rating:
· 10 Comments

About TylerDFC

CBR13 participantCBR  9CBR 8CBR 7CBR 6CBR 3CBR 2

View TylerDFC's reviews»

Comments

  1. andtheIToldYouSos says

    January 27, 2021 at 11:00 am

    I *feel* your last paragraph in my bones! Tana French gets under the skin and it’s impossible to walk away once you’re hitting the home stretch!

    Reply
    • TylerDFC says

      January 27, 2021 at 4:53 pm

      I keep waiting for her spell to break, but I have yet to give one of her books less than five stars. “The Likeness” flat out shattered me. “The Witch Elm” was my favorite book of 2018.

      Reply
      • andtheIToldYouSos says

        January 27, 2021 at 4:56 pm

        I can’t wait for you to read The Searcher!

        Reply
  2. narfna says

    January 27, 2021 at 11:59 am

    Hey, welcome back! And what a book to do it on.

    Reply
    • TylerDFC says

      January 27, 2021 at 4:52 pm

      Thanks! It’s good to be back.

      Reply
  3. Zirza says

    February 4, 2021 at 3:42 am

    This is one of those books where I KNOW it’s good, but I did NOT enjoy reading it. Damn, that was raw.

    Reply
    • TylerDFC says

      February 4, 2021 at 12:41 pm

      I expected it to be a tough ride coming from French, but I did not expect the devastation this case wreaks on everyone involved. It’s a haunting book, I’m still thinking about it 2 weeks after finishing.

      Reply
  4. vel veeter says

    February 4, 2021 at 7:42 am

    This was the only Tana French I read, instead of listened to, and I remember feeling like Scorcher didn’t super stand out as a narrator (and also was not a good man — which is definitely ok as the narrator in the first novel is not either), but that the mystery was very good. I do HIGHLY recommend listening to the audiobook of Faithful Place if you can, as 500 pages of Frank Mackay is pretty great.

    Reply
    • tiny_bookbot says

      February 6, 2021 at 2:58 pm

      Scorcher is by far my least favorite of the Murder Squad narrators. The mystery in this one was so eerie and strong, and her use of the post-Celtic Tiger economic collapse was just spot-on, but…Scorcher.

      Reply
  5. postcardsandbooks says

    February 6, 2021 at 2:23 am

    Oh wow. I’ve never heard of Tana French before, but now I definitely want to pick up something by her. Thanks for the review 🙂

    Reply

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