“[T]he People that Should Have Lived Here”: Haunting, the economy, and home in Tana French’s Broken Harbour

Ingram and Mullins examine the ghostly nature of Tana French’s 2012 novel Broken Harbour, arguing that French deliberately engages discourses of haunting to manifest the almost mystical ways in which unseen hegemonic forces invade the most sacrosanct of domestic spaces. To represent such hauntings in crime fiction is to reveal the inextricable lines between the past and the present, between domestic home life and organizing systems of social power. French’s ghosts—which are personal, communal, and national—are set against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger era of economic prosperity and the bust which followed, exposing the deep connections between crime, gender, family, and economics.