Broken Harbor
The mesmerizing fourth novel of the Dublin murder squad by New York Times bestselling author Tana French Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, the brash cop from Tana French’s bestselling Faithful Place, plays by the book and plays hard. That’s what’s made him the Murder squad’s top detective—and that’s what puts the biggest case of the year into his hands. On one of the half-built, half-abandoned "luxury" developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children are dead. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care. At first, Scorcher and his rookie partner, Richie, think it’s going to be an easy solve. But too many small things can’t be explained. The half dozen baby monitors, their cameras pointing at holes smashed in the Spains’ walls. The files erased from the Spains’ computer. The story Jenny told her sister about a shadowy intruder who was slipping past all the locks. And Broken Harbor holds memories for Scorcher. Seeing the case on the news sends his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family one summer at Broken Harbor, back when they were children.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Tana French
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What you might want to know about Broken Harbor
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Detective Scorcher Kennedy gets the kind of case that makes a career, a dead family in a half-finished Irish housing estate, baby monitors taped to the walls watching nothing. Fourth in the Dublin Murder Squad.
Broken Harbor is the fourth book in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series. Each book stands alone with a different detective narrator, but characters cross over. Reading them in order adds depth without being required.
Yes. Broken Harbor won the LA Times Book Prize for Mystery and Thriller in 2012 and the Irish Book Award. It is widely considered one of the strongest entries in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad.
Broken Harbor was written by Tana French, published in 2012 by Viking.
Broken Harbor is 480 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Broken Harbor takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Broken Harbor is a standalone novel by Tana French, not part of a series.
Broken Harbor is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.