Broken Harbor: A Novel

Last night when I went to bed, I was 90% done with Broken Harbor, and up until that point it had been a solid entry in Tana French's Murder Squad series, which is the set of books Sweetie and I are reading for our book club, which is just the two of us because neither of us really cares for people, but we both like to read.I thought I'd read for about 20 minutes, but when that was up I was near the end of a chapter, so I thought well I'll just finish this chapter and then so on until I'd finished the entire book in an hour-plus of solid reading. It wasn't even just reading, though: I felt like I was sort of holding on to the book and it was pulling me along. The ending of Broken Harbor is one of the greatest, and most chilling, endings to a book I've ever read.Broken Harbor, like each book before it, takes a character from an earlier book and focuses on him or her. This time it's "Scorcher" Kennedy, the detective who was working on the murder in Faithful Place only to screw it up and have someone else get credit for the case. At the start of Broken Harbor Kennedy is getting out of the doghouse after a long while and is put on a new case, a family murdered in a subdivision being built out of an old harbor where, it turns out, Kennedy and his family used to vacation way back when.The murdered family is two little kids and a husband; the wife is still living, barely, but not able to discuss the murders right away, and like all such murder mysteries, the heat is on. Kennedy is paired up with Richie, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks on his first big murder investigation; Kennedy gets Richie because he's never wanted a full-time partner, so he trains all the new guys and then passes them on to someone else.Like French's other books, the story is as much about the characters as the murder; while the mystery is solid (the first walkthrough of the crime scene is excellent; this is easily French's creepiest book yet), it's the background on Kennedy and Richie and the family and everyone else we run into in the course of the investigation.Kennedy's got baggage on this one: his family stopped going to Broken Harbor (now renamed a bland subdivision name) when his mom walked into the ocean and drowned herself one year, setting off what seemed to be schizophrenia in his youngest sister, Dina. He realizes that Broken Harbor appearing in the news is going to set her off again, and it does, so he's trying to investigate a murder while also keeping tabs on Dina, who is breaking down fast. Torn apart on all sides, he finds himself actually getting to like Richie as a potential permanent partner, even as the two argue about who is a more likely suspect, a friend of the family or the dead husband in a murder-suicide.That all sounds good enough, but the mystery is layers and layers deeper than that; it's French's most complex mystery yet, and there are easily three or four different possible solutions to it, so even with my penchant for guessing that each new character is the murderer, I never even came close.But that's not what makes the ending of the book like a black hole of suspense and intensity. What French does in the end is tie up, in a way, a running theme in the book: Whether there is a why to the murder. At the outset, Kennedy tells Richie that random murders are rare, that in nearly every case the dead people somehow brought murder into their lives: they hung around the wrong people or embezzled or cheated on their wives or beat them or something. Richie argues back that good people can sometimes just have bad things happen without causing it themselves, even indirectly, and Kennedy has the same sort of argument with Dina, when he tells her that he thinks she was made crazy by their mom committing suicide. "There is no why," Dina tells him, but Kennedy refuses to accept this.I can't tell you how French resolves the argument, or even really if she does, without revealing a bit too much, because that's the larger mystery at work here: is there a why? The family, they learn, was unraveling, in part because of the financial crisis (the book is set during the recent recession, a setting that has made its way into fiction way faster than you'd imagine, marking it as what I thought it might end up being when it started: the single most significant event of modern life. If the Depression and World War II marked the "Greatest Generation," then 9/11 and the Great Recession will mark our generation, and how we respond to them will demonstrate if we can rise to greatness, or if we will instead curl up and hide from responsibility. So far, all evidence points to the latter, given that we've wiped out civil liberties, handed all the money to an elite few in society, and allowed police to become a paramilitary organization charged with enforcing a new sort of Jim Crow, a fatal sort of Jim Crow.)Anyway, the husband had been laid off at the start of the recession and the family had started withdrawing from the neighborhood, such as it is -- and it's not much of a neighborhood, at that -- and Kennedy and Richie wonder whether that might have set someone off. At one point in the investigation, Kennedy almost loses it seeking a motive -- the why -- and French, at the end reveals why it's so important to him that there be a why, that there be rules which govern us.Is there a why? And if so, is why ever so simple? We watch the news and say that people killed others because of guns, because of drugs, because of poverty. Wars start because 'they hate us.' We seek cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect. And we probably blame ourselves for being the cause even as we feel we are the effects of other causes.I guess you have to have a problem/If you want to invent a contraptionSang Jack White on Effect & Cause:Well in every complicated situationThere's a human relationMaking sense of it allTake a whole lot of concentrationWell you can blame the babyFor her pregnant maAnd if there's one of these unavoidable laws It's that you can't just take the effect and make it the causeBut what is the cause? I've told people they can't blame themselves if their kids did something they didn't like. It doesn't make you a failure as a parent. President Obama barely knew his father, and yet credits him with instilling in his son a desire to be a great dad -- because he wasn't? Would Obama have been a great dad even if his own father had been around? I have two brothers and a sister, who are nothing like me and who I don't speak to. We were all raised by the same parents in the same household with the same rules. We turned out wildly different -- or at least I am wildly different from them. What's the cause? What's the effect? What is the why?As I tore through the final 10% of French's book, I was reading all the why she put in there, or lack of it, and later, after I was done, I was thinking, over and over, about the why, about whether we end up in a given place because of a set of effects, or whether we only think we are in that place because we lay a pattern over it after the fact, fitting our narrative into the way the pieces have ended up. Well if I'd been a better father, if I'd worked harder at this, if I'd taken that class, if I'd never left that job. We see fate where there might be random chance, and chance where we have been destined to do something.There are definite causes, and definite effects. There is a reason that I am adamant -- that I in part left my old, terrible, law firm -- that people need a lawyer and that the lawyer should find a way to make it affordable for those people. That reason is my own, and is private, but it is a reason nonetheless, and it contributed to my dissatisfaction with my own firm and has made me, at times, unpopular with those around me.But for the big questions, for who am I really and why am I like this and why are they like this, the why is often unknowable, if it exists. People around the world continue to blame vaccines for autism, for example, because they don't want to believe that there could be something that so drastically, and unknowably, alters their children and we wouldn't know what it is or why it does that. So they seek superficial answers, impose a gridwork over an impossible Rorschach blob and say there, that's it that's the why. There is no other childhood condition to which people attach essentially magical thinking, even though we don't know why of other childhood problems. We know what causes them but not why it happens. There have always been mysterious things that happen, to our children, to us, and we have always engaged in witchhunts and prayers to assess them and have them make sense. In that, we are not so far removed from our ancient ancestors. They believed droughts were caused by offending the gods. We tell mothers they didn't love their children the right way, and that is why the children hurt themselves.Off and on, for the last year or two, I've thought I knew the why, for those things I needed to know about, or wondered about. Then I tried to tell myself I didn't care, that there was no why, that it didn't matter. But of course it matters. Why is the difference between a universe that makes sense and a universe that can tear us apart in an instant. Why is storybook romance, is eventual cures, is society improving itself and everyone who goes to college getting a good job with rewarding work and decent pay. But why is also laying blame. Why is the cause not just of happiness, but of pain. Why is a finger pointed at someone, often a finger trembling with rage or sorrow or fear.Eventually, last night, it was time to go to sleep. It was nearly 11 p.m., and I'd been laying in bed watching TV without paying attention to it for a long time while I kicked around thoughts about this book, and about why, and about how my life led me to this point at this place with these people. I turned on my side. Everyone else in the house was asleep. I listened the dull mumble of the tv behind me, heard the water softener two floors down kicking on. The air conditioner in the window buzzed a little. You can drive yourself nuts, wondering why. You can lie awake for hours, you can drive around in the middle of the night thinking, you can stare distractedly into space when you were supposed to be washing the dishes. I fell asleep, thinking -- as I have often before -- that we can only know why, really, after everything happens. Once everything is over, we can see if the pieces really do fit together, and if they don't, we can try to make sense of the picture anyway. You can't know why until later on.Maybe that's what Heaven is. Maybe instead of clouds and harps and palaces and golden gates, Heaven is knowing why.Or maybe, instead, Heaven is no longer caring about why.

Usually I check others' reviews before writing something. For Brokern Harbor, comments are all over the place and I see justification in almost all of them. I'm not one to review a plot, but here are some observations:French's first three novels left me hungry for more, with The Likeness being my favorite. I like how she uses a secondary investigator from one novel and creates the major character for the next. (Someone else already brought that up.) I also usually like the fact that she solves the mystery but she seems to leave an unanswered question at the end. What really did happen in the woods all those years ago? In this case, too many questions are unanswered though. The biggest is WHY both husband and wife go mad. Isolation, money problems, worry, disappointment all can bring about character change, but both within weeks, with hints of severe disturbance in the children? They have had super comfortable 'perfect' lives to this point, so the reader can believe that the pressure gets to one of them--yes even both, but not to the point of madness for both. So I would have thought that some kind of chemical poisoning would be the culprit in this shoddily slapped together housing development, especially with the later hints that Broken Harbor is an evil place (put forth by Kennedy.) Also, the question of the animal skeletons and markings in the attic is not answered. I could be content with their being part of Pat's delusions, but there is the decapitated robin in the garden, too--and the monster cat in the tree in Emma's drawing. Sometimes I got the feeling that the only people in the entire development were Pat/Jenny/Jack/Emma, the Gogans, and the two young families down the street/around the corner. Yet there is mention of teenager groups and onlookers. A small detail, but unsettling to me. A question left at the end about the cause of insanity or the reality (or not) of the invading animals would be fine with me, but two major questions left unanswered made the ending unsatisfying.I was comfortable with Kennedy's character and felt that the family history, including Dina, added the depth and complexity that French is so well noted for. I also feel that Curran was an excellent foil and truly likeable. I feel that both are dismissed abruptly and unsatisfyingly. It did not seem to me that Curran needed to be written off as an inept and corrupt detective, especially as he is so truly compassionate and effective with witnesses and suspects. It is also a bit too 'managed' that Kennedy commits the reverse of Curran's crime, then ends up the same as Curran, but through his own choice. Not irony, but contrivence.As to French's writing style. I am still impressed. I am fine with Kennedy's views on life. It's not that I agree with him, but that I find his views interesting and very well developed. Her insight into her characters is what I love the most about her. My favorite thing about her writing is her characterization and her skill with developing the reader's compassion for detective, victim AND perpetrator. The Likeness is the best example of this. Her imagery still entrances me; metaphors and similes are almost always perfect. Atmosphere is powerful and almost becomes a character itself. The words 'haunting' and 'chilling' and yes, 'creepy' come to mind.The first two-thirds of the book moved quickly for me, with everything going well-not tightly drawn, but rich in detail, ambience. complexity and motivation. But it seems that French got stuck with how to develop that motivation. Too much of everything, from Kennedy's emotional over-the-top(yes, I know that was part of the characterization) with Conor, the unsolved animal mystery, even the Gogans--just too damned obnoxious--and the unexplained duex-ex-machina in reverse of Jenny's madness. It is just sort of there to explain everything. It seems that everything was thrown together in the pot in order to meet the deadline. I'm also not satisfied with the reason for Conor's descent from good/great guy into well-meaning stalker who cannot understand that missing items and carefully placed items from the past on kitchen counters would not comfort someone, but freak her out. Conor's motivations are definitely not developed. And I want to like him. I want him to be the hero, but how can he be? He sends Jenny over the edge, but he is not the cause of her troubles. I don't want to be ambivalent about him; I need him to be understood and explained.This book is a low fourth in my rankings of French's books, but I still greatly appreciated most of it. I'd like to see Curran as the subject of French's next book. I'll still keep this book on the shelf next to the other three and wait impatiently for the next one. She's that good.

This novel has received good reviews and won awards, and at some 533 pages I was expecting a well plotted thriller with complexity to justify the length of the novel. However this is definitely not what this book is.The basic story is of a family of four brutally and violently murdered with just the wife surviving with terrible injuries. The police procedural aspects are detailed to the point that over half the book describes the musings and discussions of the two detectives and their investigation to the point of tedium.There are really very few characters involved in the story and the solution involves some strange and not very credible behaviour by a few of the characters. However, it is all explained and mused over at such great length as if the author is trying us that by going into great and repetitive detail to explain behaviours and motivations the reader will be persuaded. Unfortunately I wasn't. The main murder plot is really little more than a long drawn out shaggy dog story.The story is set in post-boom Ireland where unemployment has risen and housing projects started during the boom times remain unfinished. It therefore has a depressing air to it. This together with morals and duties of a detective and the backstory of the main character try to fill the thinness of the plot with atmosphere, past tragedy, and a study of an Ireland in economic decline. To some extent the book is successful in this and redeems itself. However, as a thriller with an exciting and clever plot it utterly fails. If this is what you seek, look elsewhere.

This book started well, but for some reason it didn't hold my attention the way the previous ones in the series did (which, incidentally, can all easily be read stand-alone). I think partly it was Scorcher, the main detective, whose narrative voice I found rather stilted. Because it was told in the first person, his very tragic background was necessarily revealed rather passively, drip fed at strategic moments in the murder investigation, and I felt it lost a lot of the emotional impact it could have had if told differently. That's the problem with first person, obviously, you only get one POV and this really would have benefited from others - his partner Richie's, his sister, maybe even Fiona, the surviving victim's sister. And now I'm writing this, I think that was the problem for me - a hugely emotional book in terms of the murder, the motivation, the detective's back story and the embryonic relationship between the two detective partners - but it felt - well, flat. Which is a shame.In terms of the crime and the motivation and the end result - yes, I really enjoyed how that was unravelled though I did feel it could have been shorter. And as before, I loved the settings, the interaction of the environment (physical and economic) with the key players and their motivation. So I'll be coming back for more.

I love Tana French's lyrical writing style, it is so unusual to find in a crime / police procedural. However, unlike her other novel's I was disappointed by the plot of this one. I felt cheated by the amount of time spent on red herrings. I also found the killers motive totally baffling and unbelievable. French has written some amazingly original crime fiction, but this just felt rushed.

i had high hopes as i loved the first two books in the series, the third not so much but i persevered nonetheless . firstly i actually sighed when i realised who the main character was, after meeting him in the previous book where he presened as an odious prat. i read untl 20%, then skipped to the two final chapters where it all made sense and that was enough of him for me! it seemed to be so slow moving i could miss pages and yet nothing at all. real shame considering how much i have previously enjoyed these books and they are beautifully written.

I have been fortunate in coming late to the Dublin Murder Squad books so I've been able to enjoy them in order with no frustrating wait for the next one. They're all great but this one has been the best yet! So many possibilities for the solve, I sussed the previous ones fairly quickly but not this time. The very best thing about these books is how well-written they are - generously sprinkled with passages that are a real delight.