Name: Broken Harbor
Rating: 4.0375 (40 reviews)
ISBN: 9780143123309

Tana French

After a brutal attack that left a woman in intensive care and her husband and children dead, Scorcher Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie, struggle with perplexing clues and Scorcher's memories of a shattering incident from his childhood.

Broken Harbor

Michele Papa

Everything that stops us being animals is ending, washing away like sand, going and gone.

Zoey Mikalatos

It was the holes that got me - they kept me terrified throughout the whole book, even when the plot was moving slowly. I don't like Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy much compared to the detectives that have held the main roles in previous French novels, but he was still alright. 

"Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen."

Caitlin Snyder

Shreerag Plakazhi

The first half of this book is tough to get through. I get why she writes it in this way, that the slow burn build up pays off in the end but I had to put this one down way too many times for me to give this a full four star rating. Once it gets going though (at about the halfway mark), it moves fairly quickly to a heartbreaking finale. Tana French is a huge talent when it comes to her sheer writing ability, but I wish she would just get to the point a bit faster.

Laura

As usual, we have a brand new main character in the form of Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy. And as usual, he's new and interesting and so different from Rob Ryan or Cassie Maddox or Frank Mackey or Antoinette Conway (remember, I read The Trespasser before I read the rest of the series). I love how French isn't afraid to give each of her characters different views or opinions regarding something; I think that's what ends up making them all feel like individuals. So many authors give all their characters the same opinions on everything (ones that usually mirror the writer's) and I feel like all their characters just blend together. I know that Cassie Maddox's views on, let's say land development because it fits here, probably differ dramatically from Mick Kennedy's. It also makes it harder to guess what the author's actual opinions are, which I like. 

And the side characters were particularly fabulous in this book. Now, I really want a spinoff series following the crime scene techs. French could have so much fun with it- we could have Dr Cooper, Larry (who might have taken Cooper's spot in being my favorite side character), Sophie (who appears in a couple of the other books), Kieran, hell, even Tom the wilderness guy would be great- who knows what shit that guy gets up. I also think it would be great if she wrote a book that would be about O'Kelly back when he was a rookie detective and some case that he got himself into. That would be a really great book. See, here's the thing about Tana French- her characters, even the side ones, always grab me. She has such a great eye for detail and ear for dialogue and everything that makes a great writer, especially a great mystery writer. 

I enjoyed the actual mystery, too. It was fascinating and sad, following this family as they spiraled downward into economic ruin and madness, even if, as Kennedy said, they did everything right. And there's something about the mysteries that she writes that just capture my imagination. Like in this case, I've always been interested in the effects of something, like poverty, has on the human psyche. With the exception of Faithful Place, the mysteries just stay with me. 

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Broken Harbor

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