Broken Harbour

Broken Harbour by Tana French is a very good book, but one that’s difficult to describe.

First, it would be useful to remember the Irish financial crisis of 2008 because it forms the background for this book and drives much of it. After years of prosperity fuelled by EU money, and especially a property boom, the international financial crash hit Ireland hard and caused severe recession with huge unemployment and austerity measures. From the point of view of this book, the failure of the housing industry is important. Thousands of housing estates were built – sometimes shoddily – and when the crash occurred, they were often left unfinished and uninhabited/uninhabitable. People had been encouraged to buy and now couldn’t sell. Many of these empty estates – dubbed ghost estates – still stand.

And this is where this book starts. It begins with the murder of a family on one of these ghost estates – half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned – a place called Broken Harbour, now known as Brianstown. A husband and two young children are found dead; the mother severely injured. The police move in.

The murder squad is led by Mick Kennedy, an experienced murder detective with a good record who is very sure of himself. He is very calm, very controlling of his murder scene and his team, but also somewhat distant. For example, he does not know the names of many of the detectives working under him, he simply calls them all ’Floaters’. He has a new young detective as a partner, a boy from decidedly the wrong side of the tracks, but who is very astute and clever. At first, the two detectives think this is a simple case: the husband was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.

About a quarter of the way through the book the ‘floaters’ find evidence of someone having been spying on the murdered family from the empty, half-built house next door from a room with a clear view of their kitchen. Mick and his partner Richie set a trap and soon catch the stalker. He turns out to be a childhood friend of the murdered couple and they find enough circumstantial evidence to link him to the murders, so they arrest him. When he hears that they are about to put pressure on the severely injured wife, Jenny, for more information he immediately confesses. Mick is pleased. This quick arrest enhances his reputation, but Richie has doubts and persuades Mick to look for evidence that this could, after all, have been a murder/suicide by the husband.

The rest of the book is taken up with the two of them, plus their team, searching for evidence. As they go along even Mick begins to doubt his certainty. We follow their progress through a series of riveting interviews with the suspect; with the recovering wife; her sister; and the neighbours. It is through those interviews that we learn what happened. And we learn almost too much for comfort about how a family can fall apart during such a severe recession.

We also find out that Mick has a history from his teenage years with Broken Harbour, as well as a mentally ill sister, of whom he is very protective. Gradually through the book Mick, himself, rather falls apart as well. Mostly because of the location where he has to work, he turns from the calm, sure-of-himself murder detective to a barely-in-control mental wreck.

I very much liked this book and think it’s very well written. The characterisation is spot on, and the picture of a family living with the stress of unemployment and in a decaying new house, surrounded by half-finished, abandoned houses, is very real. Even when the husband literally starts to lose his sanity over something quite unrealistic, it somehow seems quite believable.

Not so long ago I reviewed The Wych Elm by Tana French, and I will say that this is a very different novel. In The Wych Elm the police were barely present, working behind the scenes as it were. In this one they are very present. It’s a sort of ‘police procedural’, but not like any I’ve read before. This book is part of the author’s Dublin Murder Squad series.

Broken Harbour isn’t for the faint-hearted. But in spite of 500+ pages I do recommend it, and give it 5 stars.
Freyja