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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
At first glance, Ocean View looked pretty tasty: big detached houses that gave you something substantial for your money, trim strips of green, quaint signposts. Second glance, the grass needed weeding and there were gaps in the footpaths. Third glance, something was wrong.“The village of the damned.” Every master of horror knows that true fear does not originate from a basement, fear crawls up through your spine through the emptiness of a vast, vacant room. Fear comes from isolation, and isol
I’ve been an avid fan of Tana French since her chilling debut novel, In the Woods, a poetically written murder mystery that combined police procedural with psychological thriller. She writes evocatively about solitary adults afflicted by damaged childhoods. Her novels go beyond the murder cases and weave layered tales about memories, the search for identity, the healing of broken families, and the social and economic issues of contemporary Ireland. Broken Harbor will satisfy old enthusiasts and
This is the fourth book in Tana French's 'Dublin Murder Squad' series, but - like the others - it can be read as a standalone.*****Patrick and Jenny Spain and their two young children - Emma and Jack - living in an unfinished, decaying housing development in Brianstown (formerly Broken Harbor) Ireland are attacked. Patrick and the children are dead and Jenny is barely alive. Mike ("Scorcher") Kennedy and his rookie partner Richie Curran are assigned the case. As usual with Tana French's books on...
(B) 73% | More than SatisfactoryNotes: Serviceable mystery, but the b-story lacks teeth and it's too reliant on interrogation for tension and plot development.
I miss Rob and Cassie. Wish she'd get back to their story :/
This probably seems like too few stars for a book so compelling, it's still haunting me two days later -- and making me think I'm hearing bumps in the night. But the denouement of the book was too absurd to hold up, and having Jenny be the murderer -- with such a thinly-constructed rationale -- just didn't work for me.Broken Harbor has gotten raves from professional critics for elevating the detective procedural to a level of social commentary, in this case about the personal destruction wrought...
This was a good story with plenty of excellent police work and, for the most part, an interesting relationship between Michael Kennedy and his new partner Richie Curran.Kennedy is the Dublin Murder Squads' star detective and he has a very high opinion of himself. As he is the narrator we hear his opinions, but we can see from how he deals with others that he is arrogant and single minded. Curran on the other hand is a sympathetic and caring person and brings a balance to their partnership.The cr...
2021: Bleak. Brutal. Devastating. And so good.—————2013: This may be my favorite of Tana French's novels, tied with The Trespasser and just barely overtaking Faithful Place, and I loved it immensely.***At its heart, it's a book about the terror of madness, the dreams gone awry, the slow spiral that gets you to your breaking point, and the sad pathos of desperately grasping at the straws that tether you to the world of familiar safety of normalcy.The setting of this novel scares me in the way it'...
Broken Harbour is yet another gripping psychological mystery from one of my favourite authors. I love how Ms French can always be relied on to deliver something brilliant that is far more about people and their mentalities than it is about simply solving cases. She has a real talent for creating personalities that seem to jump off the page and Scorcher Kennedy is no exception.Though all her novels offer an in-depth exploration of the human mind, I think Broken Harbour is perhaps the one that
Tana French delivers again.Murder detective Mick ( Scorcher) Kennedy is on a high profile case located in what was formerly known as Broken Harbour, now Brianstown, where his family used to vacation. He has a rookie, Richie, under his wing but it is Mick who tells us this story.Brianstown is a relatively new community development that promised would be residents an idyllic seaside community, a safe place to raise your family, build a life, pursue your dreams, then the economy plummeted leaving B...
After playing a minor role in Faithful Place, Mike 'Scorcher' Kennedy is able to steal the spotlight and prove readers why he is the Squad's star detective. Assigned to work with, Kennedy picks up a brutal assault/murder over in Brianstown, colloquially known as Broken Harbour. In Broken Harbour, Tana French's 4th novel in her Dublin Murder Squad Series, Mike ("Scorcher") Kennedy, who played a minor role in the previous book, Faithful Place, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... has been assi...
Tana French could write an obituary and I would read it. I would, in fact, hunt down the newspaper just so that I could read it. Ms. French's books are the sum of almost everything I love in fiction -- flawed characters, seriously messed up pasts, conflicting moral questions, interesting settings and subtle social commentary. I believe French's writing could be easily categorized as mystery or thriller, but I think putting French's books in those boxes is misleading and doesn't do her books the
Next time I pick up a Tana French book, someone beat me please. The spark that animated the first two books, and compensated for their structural weaknesses, has turned sour. This book just drags. While the premise -- that Ireland's recession and housing crash can literally drive you crazy or kill you - was intiriguing, the book was just bloated and in need of a good editor. The plot bogs down for about 300 pages in the middle -- I was so bored that I convinced myself into thinking the end would...
i was super invested in this. it had just the right amount of random that i was constantly on the edge of my seat. things were going every which way that it made this slow paced investigation feel exciting. i was totally prepared for a shocking ending. but the last 50 pages or so turned me off. i think if the reader was given a definite reason for why certain characters acted the way they did, then i think i would have been okay with it. but the way things turn out, with the fact that the reader...
The devil is in the details.To me, the 100% spectrum of life is divided up between two tiny slivers of white and black, the great mass of the 99.999% between is a wall of grey, lighter at one end and darker at the other, but grey. For some people, this is heresy or foolishness, life is divided evenly between white and black; order and chaos, good and bad, us and them. When I was on active duty in the US Army, there was a sergeant who loved to argue with me. He was a black and white guy, rules an...
In a lonely development on the Irish Sea, two children and their father are dead and the mother is on death's door. Who killed them? That's what Scorcher Kennedy and his new partner, Richie, mean to find out. Will what they find destroy them?Broken Harbour is the story of one man's obsession with order and a family's gradual descent into chaos. When Pat Spain gets downsized, things start falling apart for the Spain family but was it enough for Pat to kill his family and himself?Scorcher Kennedy
There are certain things I pride myself on - the ability to read through a tremendous racket without losing my thread of concentration, the audacity to share my blasphemous distaste for pizzas with pizza worshippers who then proceed to shoot me death glares, and more pertinently, the way I don't balk at rating a piece of mainstream literature 5 stars if it has shown the grit to discard gimmickry and preserve that golden human touch. How ingeniously Tana French subverts the formulaic plotting of
I'm going to do two things I almost never do.First, I'll tell you how to read: Sit down and pay attention to this book. Read in large, uninterrupted blocks of time. Trust me; you will better be able to appreciate French's character evolution (or dissolution) and the many layers of the plot become all the more shocking when they've had the chance to properly build.The second thing I rarely do: spoiler part of my review. For my memory and discussion's sake, I must be specific. Once again, French i...
Tana French continues to amaze with her fourth stunning Dublin Murder Squad novel, proving that binge-reading this series was a wonderful February treat. After playing a minor role in Faithful Place, Mike 'Scorcher' Kennedy is able to steal the spotlight and prove readers why he is the Squad's star detective. Assigned to work with rookie Detective Richie Curran, Kennedy picks up a brutal assault/murder over in Brianstown, colloquially known as Broken Harbour. When they arrive, the detectives dis...