A choice of crime novels | 6 September 2012

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.