396. Broken Harbor
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Tana French
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign
450 pages, published April 30, 2013
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
In one of the half-abandoned luxury developments that populate Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered. Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad investigates the case and finds that all is not as it seems.
Quotes
“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.”
“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”
“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”
“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”
“I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”
“If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.”
“One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead… I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.”
My Take
Broken Harbor was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fourth in her Dublin Murder Squad series) since starting my thousand book quest. Like The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor did not disappoint. French is a gifted storyteller and her mysteries are much more about the human nature involved than whodunit. A great read.
