Broken Harbor by Tana French
My rating: 5/5 cats
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 the cracks in civilized lives and gleefully pointing them out, shoving wild through, and seeing what happens.
this is a story about a triple homicide, but it is also a story of blistering loneliness.
we have a housing development gone belly-up halfway through its construction, in the middle of nowhere, half-full of people who thought they were making good on their dreams; owning a house, raising a family, taking advantage of the financial stability they had achieved. and then the economy tanked, the developers pulled out, and the owners had no recourse to law or reimbursement and are trapped on a half-built development where the vacant houses are inhabited by squatters, teenage hooligans run wild, and abandoned bulldozers and plastic-covered windows flap in the breeze. the whole thing reads desolation, isolation, shattered hopes.
stage set.
in one of these houses, a family is attacked: two young children and the father murdered, while the mother remains in a coma, fighting for her life.
enter scorcher kennedy, a detective who is himself a paradigm of studied loneliness. his youngest sister has some sort of amalgamation of schizophrenia with synesthesia-elements, his wife has moved on, and he has no close friends. all his has is his job. and he is very very good at his job. scorcher represents that last of the good detectives – he is unwavering to his own code of ethics, and a very clinical detective who can handle watching the postmortems of young children without flinching, does not mind a little verbal bullying of witnesses, all in the game, and silently disdains the shortcut actions of other detectives, proud of his spotlessness in his own set of personal ethics.
enter the wild.
Here’s what I’m trying to tell you; this case should have gone like clockwork. It should have ended up in the textbooks as a shining example of how to get everything right. By every rule in the book, this should have been the dream case.
hubris is adorable, right?
with tana french, it is never as interesting to find out who did it as much as why and how. and every reveal is so skillfully written, you will feel a little glint in your brain as the clues stack up: View Spoiler »
when those things are revealed, or when the import of them is revealed, each time, i got a little chill, and even as i was reading, thinking i knew who did it, and then second-guessing myself only to third-guess myself and go back to my original suspicion, then french would sidetrack me with these distractions, “wait, there are headless squirrel skeletons lined up in the attic???” WHAT??
and the slow unearthing of the lives of the victims, the life of scorcher, the relationship between himself and his rookie partner View Spoiler »
and when it came down the the ending, and all the characters were worse off then when they began, i just had to applaud, slowly and sadly. i felt horribly alone. i felt as though i had endured something more than just the reading of a book. all of these characters left their mark on me, and because of the nature of this “series,” i know i will never see them again, and the next book will just be about some tangential character, to whom i will probably become very emotionally attached and then abandoned. again.
from anyone else, this would be a five-star cat book, but i loved faithful place so much, i really had to leave some sort of distance between it and this one. but that is just my own personal code of rating ethics, and if hubris comes for me, i can handle it. <—- years later, i changed my mind. five full cats!
famous last words.
oh, and p.s. -if this doesn’t scare you now, it will:
trust me.
