This World Is Mostly Broken

Tana French (right) is having a hell of a year. We’re still not halfway through, and already she’s been nominated for an LA Times Book Award, an Edgar and an Anthony, all for FAITHFUL PLACE. Nice work, with her latest offering, BROKEN HARBOUR, to come in August.
  Tana, of course, makes a virtue of pulling a minor character from a previous novel into the spotlight with her latest, and BROKEN HARBOUR will follow in the stumbling footsteps of ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, who played a supporting role in FAITHFUL PLACE. So wot’s BROKEN HARBOUR all about then? Quoth Tana, from her contribution to DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS:

“It’s set somewhere out past Balbriggan [north County Dublin], on one of those half-built ‘ghost estates’, one of the quarter-inhabited ones. A family has been attacked and the father and two children are dead, the mother’s in intensive care and Scorcher, who is still not one hundred per cent back in everyone’s good books after making a mess of the case in FAITHFUL PLACE, has been assigned this case with his rookie partner. And of course, it ends up getting tangled up with Scorcher’s own personal life because Scorcher’s got a history with this location in this previous incarnation – before it was an estate, it was a place where people went on their summer holidays. He’s got a bit of history there and what with that and everything else, the case sucks him in.”

  So there you have it: another slice of thoughtful social commentary wrapped up in beautiful prose which excavates the dark secrets of a psychologically complex anti-hero as a metaphor for a broken country. Easy when you know how, eh?