{"id":748,"date":"2012-09-28T16:02:25","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T22:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=748"},"modified":"2012-09-28T16:07:51","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T22:07:51","slug":"tana-french-broken-harbor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/tana-french-broken-harbor\/","title":{"rendered":"Tana French: Broken Harbor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The two signature books of the summer, Gillian Flynn\u2019s Gone Girl<\/em> and Tana French\u2019s Broken Harbor,<\/em> share a theme: the recession, joblessness, and the losses that come with those circumstances.\u00a0 In Gone Girl, <\/em>Flynn\u2019s characters lose their jobs and investments and are forced to leave Manhattan for the wilds of Missouri, where they are fish out of water.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The former Dubliners in French\u2019s novel, Pat and Jenny, find their dream home in a development that never \u201cdeveloped,\u201d far out from the city and away from any of their friends or former lifestyle.\u00a0 And their move was made for the most prosaic of reasons:\u00a0 so their kids could grow up in a real house with a backyard.\u00a0 Like Flynn\u2019s characters, Pat has lost his job, and the development is a ghost town.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as the book opens, Pat\u2019s employment status is moot, as, along with his young children he has been found dead in his dream home.\u00a0 His wife, though not dead, is still gravely wounded.\u00a0 As the detectives called in to handle the case assess the crime scene they are mystified not only by the extreme violence that killed the husband and maimed the wife contrasted with the almost peaceful nature of the children\u2019s deaths.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the house itself.\u00a0 There are huge holes punched in the walls throughout the house, and the attic holds an assortment of cameras and a giant animal trap.\u00a0 Detective Mick \u201cScorcher\u201d Kennedy, in charge of the case, tells his rookie partner that anything odd or unexplained is a gift.<\/p>\n

As the detectives wait to see if the wife will wake up from her coma, they begin to meticulously take apart the young couple\u2019s lives. \u00a0A seemingly golden couple, things had fallen apart when Pat lost his job.\u00a0 And then there\u2019s the personal repercussions for Mick himself, who has his own tragic connection with Broken Harbor.<\/p>\n

For French, this is a more straightforward novel than usual \u2013 it\u2019s almost a straight up procedural, but I stress the almost. <\/em>Kennedy has a backstory in Broken Harbor (now renamed by the developer \u201cBrianstown\u201d) that impacts how he views the case \u2013 or does it?\u00a0 French teases out the psychological motives and behaviors of all the characters throughout the novel, layering her story with the backgrounds and ghosts of all involved.<\/p>\n

One of Tana French\u2019s great strengths is her prose \u2013 it\u2019s poetic and beautiful and she is better than almost anyone at articulating atmosphere.\u00a0 One of her drawbacks, in my opinion, is her tendency to write too long.\u00a0 This is a wonderful novel, and one that could have been even better with 50 or 100 pages cut from it.\u00a0 I wandered a bit attention wise at some points, but by the end I was totally glued to the page.\u00a0 The resolution of the story is unexpected and yet well foreshadowed.\u00a0 You\u2019ll finish the book with a real knowledge of Mick Kennedy and his heartbreaking case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The two signature books of the summer, Gillian Flynn\u2019s Gone Girl and Tana French\u2019s Broken Harbor, share a theme: the recession, joblessness, and the losses that come with those circumstances.\u00a0 In Gone Girl, Flynn\u2019s characters lose their jobs and investments and are forced to leave Manhattan for the wilds of Missouri, where they are fish … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":751,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748\/revisions\/751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}