Broken Harbour

'One of the most talented crime writers alive' Washington Post

'I've been enthusiastically telling everyone who will listen to read Tana French' Harlan Coben, author of Safe

Sometimes there is no safe place.
Nothing about the way this family lived shows why they deserved to die.
But here's the thing about murder: ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it doesn't break into people's lives.
It gets there because they open the door and invite it in...

In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad's star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself. But there are too many inexplicable details and the evidence is pointing in two directions at once.

Scorcher's personal life is tugging for his attention. Seeing the case on the news has sent his sister Dina off the rails again, and she's resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family, one summer at Broken Harbour, back when they were children. The neat compartments of his life are breaking down, and the sudden tangle of work and family is putting both at risk . . .

Tana French grew up in Ireland, Italy, the United States and Malawi. She is the author of In the Woods (winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards for Best First Novel), The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbour (winner of the LA Times prize for Best Mystery/Thriller), The Secret Place and The Trespasser (Crime Fiction Book of the Year, Irish Book Awards).
She lives in Dublin with her husband and two children.
www.tanafrench.com