The only thing I kept thinking about as I read the 450-page mystery was I felt French delved too deeply in the reasoning behind the holes in the Spains’ walls. To be honest, it was hard for me to find anything really wrong with this novel. Just like in French’s three previous novels, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor is a success in so many ways, and a failure in very few.

Broken Harbor was an up-and-coming little suburb of sorts, but then the economy fell, as did the characters’ living, and then the lot of houses becomes, in so many words, haunted. French shows what happens to a specific location over time, through the characters and their lives. And, that is what I love most about this novel. She looks at the locations and how they are affected by time. She looks at the situations each character get themselves in. She looks at each character and how they got there. He and his partner Richie, the loveable character of the novel, investigate all the possibilities as to what happened to the Spains: the father, Patrick, little Emma and her younger brother Jack, and the survivor, Jenny.īut there are twists and turns, like in every good mystery, that bends the mind and makes the reader think: what is going on here?įrench is a very successful writer when it comes to this style of writing. Scorcher is called to Broken Harbor, newly named Brianstown, where a family of four have been attacked, and only one survived. And, Broken Harbor is the second novel by French that is blindingly perfect in the murder mystery genre.īroken Harbor takes Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, a murder detective in Dublin, Ireland, and throws him back into his past: one of heartbreak, fear and then willpower. Every so often, someone comes along who knows the insides and outsides of her genre so magnificently, it’s hard to understand just how her mind works to create such writing.

Broken harbor book review