Scorcher, 42, functions better than Dina on the surface, but is pompous, rigid, and resists emotional attachments. Twenty-seven years later, the family is still feeling the repercussions.ĭina, now 33, was only six then and is still quite childlike when she isn’t acting downright batty. But when he was fifteen, his mother, mentally unbalanced to begin with, purposefully walked into the sea and never came out. He also has bad associations with Broken Harbor: Scorcher spent every summer until his fifteenth year at this former small beach village where the working class could go on holiday in rented trailers by the Irish Sea. Scorcher is a control freak, with the not-so-ironic (as it turns out) burden of having a younger sister Dina who is totally out of control.

As the book begins, Dublin Detective Sergeant Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy and his rookie partner Richie Curran are called to the scene of the grisly remains of three out of four of the Spain family, in their broken-down house in Broken Harbor. The whole country went insane, and them along with it. Pat described their purchase of a house beyond their means as a leg up on “the property ladder” and “a brilliant investment.” But when the bubble burst, it wasn’t only the finances of the Spains that were destroyed, but their lives. Pat and Jenny Spain, the 29-year old parents of two young children, bought into the whole get-rich-effortlessly dream that destroyed so many like them on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in Ireland. We agree for the most part about it, but had a few minor differences.įor me, even though I didn’t like the characters in this book as much as I have liked them in French’s other books, and even though I thought some tighter editing would have helped, it was still difficult not to fall under the spell of French’s haunting (even vaguely Gothic) murder mystery.īroken Harbor, now called Brianstown, is a half-empty development project that reifies Ireland’s 2008–2012 banking and real estate speculation meltdown.

Broken harbour by tana french