Broken Harbor in What's the Name of That Book???

Jul 27, 2012 karen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: distant-lands

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..

there is no better quote to encapsulate this book. because wild doesn't always want to stay out, and tana french keeps finding ...more

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May 05, 2014 Punk rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery

Mystery. Brianstown should have been a beautiful estate with dozens of posh houses by the sea, but the developers pulled out and many of the lots are empty, the houses unfinished. Only a handful of people live there now, spread out across the abandoned development. It's a ghost town, and something's gone badly wrong there.

This is easily the creepiest book of the series. It also wins the award for most gruesome, as well as most mysterious. Scorcher's past lightly seasons the mystery, but it's not Mystery. Brianstown should have been a beautiful estate with dozens of posh houses by the sea, but the developers pulled out and many of the lots are empty, the houses unfinished. Only a handful of people live there now, spread out across the abandoned development. It's a ghost town, and something's gone badly wrong there.

This is easily the creepiest book of the series. It also wins the award for most gruesome, as well as most mysterious. Scorcher's past lightly seasons the mystery, but it's not all about him, which also sets this book apart from the others. I can't tell if I missed that level of personal involvement or not. On the one hand, maybe it would have made Scorcher more sympathetic. On the other hand, Scorcher is a boring dickbag. Having his personal issues overwhelm the story might have only made him more intolerable. The good thing about him, though, is that he's totally transparent. You can see all the spots where he's fooling himself, how those lies are necessary to his world view, and the ways they inform his investigation. He has to believe these things in order to get through the day, but his coping strategies totally steer him wrong, here, and probably even back in Faithful Place. He's maybe not as good a detective as he thinks. He gets an idea and then can't let it go. Knowing this doesn't make him any more tolerable—No, Scorcher, a flashy BMW is not the quality that victims of violent crimes most want to see in a detective—but at least you know where he's coming from. He earns your sympathy, or, I don't know, maybe it's pity instead, because you can see right through him and you just want to pat his hand and slap him about the face a little until he wakes up. Probably not in that order.

Scorcher's other redeeming quality is Richie. Scorcher's relationship with his new partner is sweet and hopeful. It warmed my heart to see him getting along with another human being, gradually coming to realize he could rely on this person to have his back and take his side, their shoulders pressed together as they stare at their suspect through the interview room window. Of course, well, if you know Tana French, you know how that ended.

The thing that really makes this book stand out is its atmosphere: The housing development with its half-built houses, its distant residents, the damp, dark, oppressive roar of the sea. The house where the murders take place is its own mystery, and I found the saga of the internet message boards strangely gripping. Like reconstructing someone's internet history is exciting? But it was. Because the mystery of the attic!!! What the fuck is up there!!! I thought it was a great way to deal with that part of the story because the medium—the internet—can be just as wild, exaggerated, and unreliable as human imagination, and its serialized nature made me eager to know what happened next.

Four stars. Though the reveal is fairly prosaic, it genuinely frightened me, how fragile our grip on civility really is, and how far some people will go to maintain that facade.

Contains murdered children, and a wrong-headed and hurtful view of mental illness. ...more

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Apr 10, 2018 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: broken, detective-mystery, ireland, psych-psych-psych, mystery

3.5 stars

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals.

At first, I wasn't so keen on reading a book featuring Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, because he had seemed like such a "pompous git" (to quote his ...more

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Feb 23, 2019 Melinda Worfolk rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: women-authors, 2015-2019, good-audio-books, mystery-suspense-thriller, fiction

Top notch narration by Steven Hogan.

I know some people found this slow, but for me that just added to the creeping dread. This is about madness, grief, and love, as much as it is about murder. The housing development in Broken Harbour was described so clearly I could picture it in detail; it functions as an excellent metaphor for the desperation and hollowness of unsustainable acquisition and not being able to recognize how or when to cut one's losses and get out alive, when the infrastructure ...more

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Apr 14, 2019 emily rated it really liked it

Shelves: mystery-and-crime, detectives-and-private-eyes, audiobook, 2019, cw-copaganda

This is my least favorite of French's books so far, but it was still very, very good. The ending was bleak, both in the unraveling of the mystery and in its effects on Scorcher's life, and I was really quite bummed out by it. But her writing is incredible, her window into the human heart and mind is brutally clear, and her stories never fail to wring empathy from me. ...more

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May 08, 2013 Jessie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I love this series. This particular entry was incredibly grim, sad, bleak, and awful. It's a murder story that involves children, but it also manages to be about isolation and mental illness and how tenuous everything in our lives is. Heartbreaking. I have a really hard time with child murder as a plot point these days, but French is so masterful and the book is just so damn good, I read it in about a day. ...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Jen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: murder_mayhem_et_al

*sigh* my review got lost when I changed editions.

Nutshell: almost three stars. Too long, but rushed in some areas, and the behavior of a character at the end is annoying, and makes him/her more unlikeable.

But the fourth star: Author nails describing a place. And who'd think that the economy could play such a strong role in the crime? And what author can make you feel bad for a murderer because of the economy? This one. Read her. ...more

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