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liralen 's review for:
Broken Harbor
by Tana French
The one thing that upsets me about this book is that now I'm more than halfway through the series, and I only have two Dublin Murder Squad books left to read.
Normally I say that I like my murder mysteries blood-soaked and terrifying: I want to be biting my fingernails, waiting for somebody to do the hero(ine) in, and I want the book to give me nightmares. I'm partial to psychological thrillers and books that take place in the woods, where nobody can hear you scream. (Don't ask what this has done to my ability to hang out alone in the woods.) This series isn't quite like that. Oh, there's plenty of blood to go around in Broken Harbour; the crime Mick Kennedy is investigating involves the violent stabbing of two people. But the real work comes in the characterisation, in seeing Kennedy wrestle with what happened and who and why and how the case intersects with his own history. This deep psychological scrub is where French has excelled in previous books in the series, and Broken Harbour is no different.
One quibble: I had a hard time separating Kennedy's voice from Mackey's in Faithful Place. I'm not sure whether that's because they both come off as super hard-boiled or because Kennedy as narrated by Kennedy is rather less egotistical than Kennedy as narrated by Mackey, but I ended up less invested in Kennedy than I might otherwise have been. But the mess he's investigating...it's thoroughly and beautifully done.
Normally I say that I like my murder mysteries blood-soaked and terrifying: I want to be biting my fingernails, waiting for somebody to do the hero(ine) in, and I want the book to give me nightmares. I'm partial to psychological thrillers and books that take place in the woods, where nobody can hear you scream. (Don't ask what this has done to my ability to hang out alone in the woods.) This series isn't quite like that. Oh, there's plenty of blood to go around in Broken Harbour; the crime Mick Kennedy is investigating involves the violent stabbing of two people. But the real work comes in the characterisation, in seeing Kennedy wrestle with what happened and who and why and how the case intersects with his own history. This deep psychological scrub is where French has excelled in previous books in the series, and Broken Harbour is no different.
One quibble: I had a hard time separating Kennedy's voice from Mackey's in Faithful Place. I'm not sure whether that's because they both come off as super hard-boiled or because Kennedy as narrated by Kennedy is rather less egotistical than Kennedy as narrated by Mackey, but I ended up less invested in Kennedy than I might otherwise have been. But the mess he's investigating...it's thoroughly and beautifully done.