Broken Harbour

"Yes. The series is based around the Dublin Murder Squad . I haven’t read all of them. But each one focuses on a different detective in the squad. Each has their own baggage that they bring. French highlights one detective in each book and the others are bit characters in the background. In this one, it’s a detective called Scorcher Kennedy. A family has been found dead—well, the husband and two children are dead and the wife is in a coma—in a ghost housing estate called Brianstown, which was once known as Broken Harbour, just outside Dublin. This housing estate was one of the casualties of the Irish property crash. There was the housing boom followed by the crash that happened in 2008 and left a trail of halfway-built luxury developments as ghost towns. Some people had already bought these houses off plan. Because they were only half-built there was often no infrastructure, but people still had to live there because they couldn’t sell them. This is what has happened to this family, the Spains, and why they were stuck living in this abandoned development. The father was laid off from work and hadn’t worked for six months. So, the assumption is it’s a murder-suicide. Scorcher Kennedy is brought in to investigate, but there are some very strange elements to this case. The house is immaculate inside, but it’s full of holes drilled in the walls. There’s a big trap in the attic with iron teeth and there are baby monitors everywhere, even though the Spain kids were far too old to need them. There are all these elements of mystery that don’t quite support the murder-suicide theory. The book revolves around the investigation into what happened in that house. It becomes clear that this man, who had been laid off and who, along with his whole family, was trapped somewhere they really didn’t want to be, gradually lost his grip on reality. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But there’s another layer, which is that detective Scorcher Kennedy used to come to Broken Harbour, as it was then called, on holiday as a child. And something awful happened on one of these childhood holidays, that caused a major rift in his family. This is revealed bit by bit, as he’s unravelling the mystery in the present day. They come together in the sense that we’ve talked about—of dysfunctional families being connected by the common thread of their unhappiness. It’s all about family secrets and tensions at the heart of family life, what people communicate and what they keep to themselves."