Broken Harbour by Tana French*****

Reading Dates: 15 April – 21 June 2019

Another solid crime novel by Tana French. Her writing and plots keep surprising me; she truly knows how to work the genre. Here, the twists are not massive, there are no red herrings, false avenues or incredible discoveries. She explores the police partner relationship and does so extremely well, questioning trust and the idea of working together with someone rather than individually, even when this means going against one’s instincts, at least for a while.

My only issue, which I also have with the last book, is that the main character appears much less floored than when they were a secondary. I wanted Scorcher to boast, to be arrogant, to have fits of anger … Broken Harbour is a sad story (or, rather, two sad stories), heartbreaking from the beginning and elegantly so. What does not quite gel for me, at least not completely, is that in the mental health breakdown scenario, help would not be sought and prevalence would be given to what other people thought. But perhaps I have lived too long in the UK, where these issues are more normalised. In Spain, what happens in the book would be absolutely plausible, so perhaps it is so in Ireland too.