Name: Broken Harbor
Rating: 4.0375 (40 reviews)
ISBN: 9780670023653

Tana French

Broken Harbor

Michele Papa

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

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.

This is my least favorite Dublin Murder Squad book so far.  I thought the mystery was easy to figure out, and the long scenes interviewing suspects were repetitive.  I was also disgruntled by the ending.

shellybn

Lara Engle

This is more of a 3.5, but I'm rounding to four stars. As always, Tana French's prose is lyrical as haunting. Again, this is a family drama driven by character dressed up as a murder mystery. However, this time I wasn't won over by the main character. No matter how unsavory I found the character in a previous book, in the other episodes of this series I fell in love with them when they became the central character. This time, I feel like I came to understand Mick better, but I never grew to like him. He still seemed stiff and somewhat cruel (even to himself) by the end of the book. It just didn't move me the way the other books did.

The mystery itself is well done. It's tragic and it makes you think. It's wrapped around the wider crisis of the global financial crash of 2008 and the ghost subdivisions (or estates) it left in its wake. The investigation relies heavily on interrogation and conversations with various technical experts, so it's not exactly action packed. But it is a puzzler. This book is my least favorite of the series, but in a series this good, my least favorite isn't all that bad.

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

Melody Izard

Mary Ann told me. But this book has been sitting on my to read shelf for far too long. 

Tana French writes of loneliness and isolation with false hopes covered by the sea sand. Murder - yes of course. But that is the least of the story.

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. 

Continue reading this review on my blog here: http://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/20...

Broken Harbor

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