17 Jul 2012 07:33:00
It's possibly the most perfect post-crash setting for a slice of genuinely disturbing horror: an Irish housing estate built during the height of the boom years, now mostly empty and abandoned, half-finished, horribly symbolic. In Ocean View, Brianstown – "A new revelation in premier living. Luxury houses and apartments now viewing", trumpets the sign at the entrance – the Spain family has been attacked. The young children are dead, smothered in their beds. Their parents were stabbed with a knife, father Pat dead, mother Jenny fighting for her life.It's an evil crime, and evil stalks the pages of Irish author Tana French's fourth novel "like a low cloud of sticky black dust spreading slowly out from this room to cover the houses, the fields, blotting out the moonlight". Detective "Scorcher" Kennedy feels it as a presence, "that needle-fine vibration, starting in my temples and moving down the bones into my eardrums", when he enters the devastated Spain household.
At first the solution seems obvious. "You would be amazed at how seldom murder has to break into people's lives. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in," says Scorcher. The finger is pointed, at first, at Pat, who lost his job months earlier. Being broke, says Scorcher, "can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that's left is teeth and claws and terror".
Except things are far from simple, and the case quickly starts to spiral out of control. Nothing feels right in the Spain family's classy, expensive home: the walls are full of holes, there are video monitors planted all over the place, and it looks like Pat was trying to catch some sort of beast in the loft. Meanwhile, Scorcher is battling demons of his own: a sister clinging to sanity by her fingernails, a rookie partner and memories of a tragedy earlier in his life.
French has adopted an unusual tactic with her series of thrillers set in and around Dublin. Instead of focusing on a single detective, she's chosen the fictional Murder Squad, with each of her novels told from a different investigator's viewpoint. It allows her to explore her protagonists from multiple perspectives: Scorcher presents himself as a good guy, uncomplicated, "decent looks if I say so myself", but readers of Faithful Place, told by his rival Frank Mackey, know he's a little edgier than that. And despite his protestations that he's "the least fanciful guy around", Scorcher is prone to many a flight of fancy, played out in French's enticing, threatening, atmospheric prose. "The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through all the empty window-holes, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilisation, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals."
Broken Harbour is a tale about the different facets of obsession and insanity, and it winds up to a finale that is almost too distressing. The best yet of French's four excellent thrillers, it leaves its readers – just like the Spains – "throat-deep in terror".
