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A review by julia_may
Broken Harbour by Tana French
4.0
I'd read this when it first came out but never added it to GR. Re-reading it now, it was still hugely compelling, and Tana French does the atmosphere of impending doom so, so well. I knew what was coming, I knew what had taken place and I still couldn't put it down.
A whole family attacked - the kids and the husband dead, the wife in hospital barely hanging on. The knee-jerk assumption - husband must've done it - doesn't seem to fit the evidence. The wife had told someone that she thought someone was breaking in to their place and moving things. The house is full of big holes in walls and a bunch of video-enabled baby monitors are pointing at the holes. Creepy much? Oh, and they live on one of Ireland's "ghost estates". Look those up, they are chilling.
The theme that runs through this book is the role of cause and effect versus chaos/randomness in shaping our lives. If you make the right decisions and do things correctly, most people would expect that to lead a Good Life, with Good Things and No Random Bad Shit. But is that true? Does Random Bad Shit sometimes just happen to Good People? Or maybe they are not all that good and maybe they've done something to invite the badness into their life and we just don't want to face that truth? The investigating detectives grapple with this duality as they try to figure out what the hell was going on in this weird shiny new house of a seemingly normal and boring middle class family and as usual, Tana French doesn't serve up convenient black and white answers. I still can't decide which factors played the greatest role in leading to the murders.
Creepy, atmospheric, claustrophobic. I was reading it late into last night/very early morning and then started seeing dark creepy shadows everywhere when I tried to sleep. So maybe read only during daylight hours if you are easily spooked.
A whole family attacked - the kids and the husband dead, the wife in hospital barely hanging on. The knee-jerk assumption - husband must've done it - doesn't seem to fit the evidence. The wife had told someone that she thought someone was breaking in to their place and moving things. The house is full of big holes in walls and a bunch of video-enabled baby monitors are pointing at the holes. Creepy much? Oh, and they live on one of Ireland's "ghost estates". Look those up, they are chilling.
The theme that runs through this book is the role of cause and effect versus chaos/randomness in shaping our lives. If you make the right decisions and do things correctly, most people would expect that to lead a Good Life, with Good Things and No Random Bad Shit. But is that true? Does Random Bad Shit sometimes just happen to Good People? Or maybe they are not all that good and maybe they've done something to invite the badness into their life and we just don't want to face that truth? The investigating detectives grapple with this duality as they try to figure out what the hell was going on in this weird shiny new house of a seemingly normal and boring middle class family and as usual, Tana French doesn't serve up convenient black and white answers. I still can't decide which factors played the greatest role in leading to the murders.
Creepy, atmospheric, claustrophobic. I was reading it late into last night/very early morning and then started seeing dark creepy shadows everywhere when I tried to sleep. So maybe read only during daylight hours if you are easily spooked.