Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy is the star of the Dublin Murder Squad. He plays by the books and plays hard, and thatʼs how the biggest case of the year ends up in his hands.
On one of the half-abandoned “luxuryˮ developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care. At first, Scorcher thinks itʼs going to be an easy solve, but too many small things canʼt be explained: the half-dozen baby monitors pointed at holes smashed in the Spainsʼ walls, the files erased from the familyʼs computer, the story Jenny told her sister about a shadowy intruder slipping past the houseʼs locks. And this neighborhood—once called Broken Harbor—holds memories for Scorcher and his troubled sister, Dina: childhood memories that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control.
It was an exciting moment, realizing that there was a Tana French mystery that I'd somehow forgotten to read, and this did not disappoint.
This tale centers around Detective "Scorcher" Kennedy. Not only is there an intriguing murder to solve, but the concurrent challenges in Scorcher's personal life and in his dealings with colleagues make for a nice, dense read. And I think it ended at the right place.
Not my favourite of the Murder Squad series, partly because the main character wasn’t someone I particularly liked, and partly because the ‘ghost estates’ are just so depressing. But it still held my attention pretty much continuously over the days I spent reading it.
A long, sometimes slow-moving, creepy, and extraordinarily well-written novel about a family attacked in their new estate home on the outskirts of Dublin. A father and his two children are dead, their mother found bleeding beside her husband, and nothing adds up. As "Scorcher' Kennedy schools a young detective in the fine art of police work, he keeps a firm line drawn between the investigation taking place in a ghost town of a half-built housing development, left abandoned by its builders when the crash left Ireland overextended and out of luck, and his personal life, including caring for his mentally unstable sister unwelcome memories of family outings at Broken Harbor, then a seaside holiday site, now a grim reminder of a broken economy and all the dreams that broke with it. The half-built estate and the emotional reaction of the family to the sudden halt of the future they had …
A long, sometimes slow-moving, creepy, and extraordinarily well-written novel about a family attacked in their new estate home on the outskirts of Dublin. A father and his two children are dead, their mother found bleeding beside her husband, and nothing adds up. As "Scorcher' Kennedy schools a young detective in the fine art of police work, he keeps a firm line drawn between the investigation taking place in a ghost town of a half-built housing development, left abandoned by its builders when the crash left Ireland overextended and out of luck, and his personal life, including caring for his mentally unstable sister unwelcome memories of family outings at Broken Harbor, then a seaside holiday site, now a grim reminder of a broken economy and all the dreams that broke with it. The half-built estate and the emotional reaction of the family to the sudden halt of the future they had planned so carefully is a powerful depiction of the trauma caused by the economic crash - and of the super-heated materialistic "Celtic Tiger" economy that preceded it, warping a generation's sense of values. The interplay between the investigation and Kennedy's own fierce devotion to his idea of order, a firm, clear, no nonsense way of looking at the world that he's trying to impart to his young charge, that adds a moving twist to what is often a modern Gothic, full of twisted psychological denial. It's Kennedy's occasional vulnerability and tenderness that gives the ending a heartbreaking touch of grace.
