Broken Harbor

I’ve now read all five of Tana French’s novels, and Broken Harbor is the fourth one she wrote. I’ve favorably reviewed the others, and raved about two of them (see the blog), but this effort did not live up to the others. It does not get my recommendation as a good and entertaining crime novel.

Mick Scorcher Kennedy was a senior detective on the Murder Squad who had the highest solve rate of anyone in the department. But, he had just had come back to the Murder Squad after some time away, and the grisly murders of three of four family members in Broken Harbor was his first new case. He accepted as his partner Richie Curran who, after years of being a policeman, had just been promoted to the Murder Squad. This was his first case. Much of the action had to do with reconstructing the crime scene and trying to understand what happened. Only the mother survived the knife wounds of the assailant, and her survival was in question for the first half of the book. Curran and Kennedy seemed to work as a good team who had an intuitive feel for one another, a quick partnership that allowed for arguing about the details and possibilities, something that usually does not come so quickly to detective partners. Kennedy was well supported by his boss, but he had an antagonist, an inadequate and jealous detective whose presence made Kennedy’s work so much harder.

French took us to the details of the lives of everyone involved, including Kennedy. It was important that his mother had committed suicide at the same seaside village where the new murders took place. But, there were too many details, especially with the notion that there was a wild animal in the attic in the home where the murders took place. The details interfered with the flow of the story. Had I not been a very big fan of French from her prior novels, I would not have stayed with this book to the end.