Broken Harbor by Tana French

Halloween night at our house. As with every year, we anxiously await trick or treaters, but over the years they have dwindled. And this year, none — even our favorite 5 (no I’m-almost-6!) year old didn’t get to stop by.

Our basket sat untouched by the front door .

Where was everyone? Down on the beach where the city closed the highway to traffic.

Safe and fun for all involved. No crossing streets, no cars. Tables set up by volunteers, parents, and local groups to serve treats (lots of treats) for the revelers. There were costume parades, pumpkin carving, and a photographer to capture it all. It’s the new, safer, and arguably better Halloween for everyone.

Full disclosure, we were loath to venture into the fray of sugar-frenzied kids and exhausted parents. So, I gathered these photos from our local Facebook page as evidence. (Click each to make larger – the family portrait is especially stunning.)

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As night fell, we closed our curtains knowing our neighborhood little ones had a wonderful time. So what to do on a silent doorbell Halloween night? Settle in with a cup of tea and finish my book – and perhaps a Reeses (see lonely basket above).

Broken Harbor by Tana French

I’m a big fan of Tana French and am reading her Dublin Murder Squad series in order — I inhaled the first three and started Broken Harbor as my October, Halloween-ish read.

French is notorious for her debut novel, In The Woods (2007) which violated one of the key rules of the murder mystery genre (I won’t tell!). Her other books, The Likeness (2008) and Faithful Place (2010), have also distinguished themselves for their realistic (read gruesome) crime scenes, detailed, nuanced characters, and a loosely linked cast of detective protagonists.

Each of Ms. French’s installments take the point of view of a different member of the detective team. Broken Harbor is the fourth and there are two more in what is now commonly referred to as the Dublin Murder Squad series.

Broken Harbor tells a case from Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy’s view point. Kennedy is the big man of the Dublin Murder Squad. He plays strictly by the books and has a relentless work ethic. Thatʼs how one of biggest cases of the year ends up in his hands. A horrific case; a report that an entire family of four — mother, father, daughter and son – have been found dead in Broken Harbor.

Broken Harbor is a half-abandoned, so-called, luxury housing development on the coast near Dublin. The developers fled during the economic crash, leaving behind empty and abandoned homes. A few families are hanging on, despite the crumbling foundations and shoddy workmanship. The Spain family, are now dead in what they had hoped would be their forever home.

Of course all is not what it seems. The first surprise is that the mother is still alive, but badly beaten and clinging to life with multiple stab wounds. The second wrinkle is that Kennedy is given a new rookie partner to work with, Richie Curran, who has managed to pull himself out of lower class squalor by his bootstraps to a hard-fought position on the Dublin Murder Squad. The third complicating factor is that Broken Harbor used to be known by the less lyrical name of Brianstown and is also the place where Kennedy’s own mentally imbalanced mother committed suicide by walking into the sea with his now-mentally ill youngest sister Dina.

How’s that for a plot set up? I found it hard to like Kennedy when he first appeared in Faithful Place, but here Ms. French gives him a complexity that I found compelling.

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.

Kennedy presses hard to solve this case pressuring his young rookie to exhaustion. But the interplay between them is engaging, as the older, more experienced detective guides the younger one down a path that may, or may not, be right one.

Although not really a character, the Broken Harbor housing development plays a major role. The economic crash that brought down so many dreams sets a haunting scene. The half-built development where many of the houses lie vacant or are inhabited by squatters, abandoned bulldozers and torn plastic-covered windows flapping in the breeze — the whole thing reads desolation and shattered hopes. The reader can feel the isolation and the hopelessness left behind. It’s easy to identify with a generation that played by the rules, did what they were supposed to do, only to find that they had been sold a bill of goods and that were now trapped.

Kennedy tells it like this:

In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order. I remember this country back when I was growing up. We went to church, we ate family suppers around the table, and it would never even have crossed a kid’s mind to tell an adult to fuck off. There was plenty of bad there, I don’t forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood and we didn’t break the rules lightly. If that sounds like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-fashioned or uncool, think about this: people smiled at strangers, people said hello to neighbors, people left their doors unlocked and helped old women with their shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero. Sometime since then, we started turning feral. Wild got into the air like a virus, and it’s spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can’t have it the second they want it. Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone. The final step into feral is murder.

There are to things to reveal to you about this novel. Kennedy’s sister who is suffering from mental health issues is left to either stay with Kennedy or their older sister and often escaping unsupervised into the streets of Dublin. Why is there no mental healthcare offered to her? And — trigger warning, the murder of the two children is described in detail, not once, but several times.

One thing I’ve picked up from Ms. French’s books is that she is the queen of obfuscation — a connoisseur of finding the cracks in our so-called civilized lives and gleefully pointing them out. The reader has to come to grips with the fact that nothing ever works out – for anyone.

And as dark as that sounds, I found Broken Harbor rich with detail and complexity of motivation. A complex contradiction of madness and guilt, as well as loyalty and family relationships. The characters are real and flawed and beautiful. And the story is twisty, heartbreaking, and oh so human. The final confession was so well written that it made me choke-up and re-read it again.

And while this novel delivers a human villain, when all is said and done, it’s the recession of 2008 that is the ultimate offender and the reader sees how almost every character in the book was hurt as a result.

And, as with each of Ms. French’s series, I find myself highly invested in the future of the investigator almost more than the investigation itself — Broken Harbor is no different in that regard. I eagerly look forward to the next in line on my bookshelf.