Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a chilly self-awareness.
The story opens when a seemingly perfect family becomes the victim of a murderous attack at their home. The two young children are smothered; the parents are stabbed in the course of a bloody fight in the kitchen that leaves the father dead and the mother wounded, perhaps fatally. The victims’ home is in Brianstown, a half-built coastal resort that fell victim to the Irish recession. Paradise has gone sour for the family as well: the slump has left the parents out of work, mired deep in debt and stuck in the middle of nowhere. For Kennedy, the location has a private significance. Brianstown was once rural Broken Harbour, the scene of idyllic childhood holidays. But, iof 19th-century architecture in Britainn the end, paradise also went sour for him.
In one way this is a novel about victims. French is an impressive writer who knows just how to manipulate her readers’ emotions. There’s a strong Gothic flavour, a sense of long shadows stretching from the past and darkening the present. At 500-plus pages the book is perhaps a little too long but, as revelation follows revelation, the dark pull of the narrative keeps you enthralled until the entirely satisfying ending.
No one could accuse Louise Welsh of prolixity. The Girl on the Stairs (John Murray, £16.99) is crisply written and tightly constructed, gaining much of its considerable impact by its economy. The protagonist, Jane, is pregnant and has just moved from London to Berlin to live with her German partner, Petra, a businesswoman who seems no great shakes at empathy.
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