by Tana French (Get the Book)Each of French's novels (Faithful Place, 2010) offers wonderfully complex and fully realized characters. Broken Harbor offers half a dozen, not least Mick Scorcher Kennedy, the Dublin Garda's top homicide detective. Scorcher is smart, tireless, dutiful, and by-the-book, and he demands no less from coworkers. But when he and his brand-new partner are assigned a savage triple homicide in a distant housing development, abandoned before completion when the Irish housing bubble burst, Scorcher is shaken; the development is located in a place that gave him the best and worst moments of his life. Broken Harbor begins as a compelling and detailed procedural but soon shifts focus to the character of its characters. Whether cops, victims, survivors, witnesses, or suspects, all are brilliantly drawn and ultimately broken by the crime and the events in their lives. Although too little known to U.S. readers, Ireland's ghost estates are a key motif: hundreds of large, abandoned developments with few occupied homes, often shabbily built and lacking critical infrastructure, far from workplaces, being reclaimed by feral nature. French's descriptive powers are both vivid and nuanced, and her deeply creepy ghost estate inspires madness and a subtle kind of gothic horror. French has never been less than very good, but Broken Harbor is a spellbinder. --Booklist
