What I’m Reading: Tana French

Broken Harbor by Tana French

Four stars

Tana French’s fourth outing with the Dublin murder squad features Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, the detective with the squad’s best solve rate whose career has been stalled by a case that ended badly. But he’s given a chance at redemption when he’s charged with solving the brutal attack on a young family that left the father and two kids dead and the mother barely alive in their new home on an half-built and never-to-be-finished housing development at the outer reaches of Dublin’s suburbs. He’s partnered with a rookie detective named Richie Curran who’s up from the meanest streets in Dublin and, as is usual with French’s protagonists, has been damaged himself by his mother’s suicide when he was a teenager. Her death left Scorcher and his older sister with the job of holding together their shattered family, including the father who never recovered and a much younger and very disturbed sister. From that family tragedy, Kennedy learned the necessity to obtain and retain control — of himself, of his family, of his cases and of his perps. Unlike French’s The Likeness, which featured an cop going under cover to solve a murder, and Faithful Place, which featured a cop going rogue with a parallel investigation of a cold case, Broken Harbor is a straight-up whodunit with layer of how-to as Kennedy tutors Curran in the “rules” of their game and a skillfully woven set of red herrings that kept me uncertain of exactly whodunit until close to the end of the novel. One of the more interesting — and unsettling — aspects of the story is watching the ease with which the detectives shift their focus from suspect to suspect as new information or evidence is uncovered, trying out story after story of whodunit and why. In the end, they’ve developed multiple stories backed by solid evidence and could likely convict any of the suspects. But as much as Kennedy is obsessed with rules, he’s also dedicated to getting it right, no matter the cost to himself or anyone else.