Half Broken Things [Paperback]

Morag Joss (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 25, 2006

A gripping tale of psychological suspense perfect for the readership of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, Half Broken Things is a novel that peers into the lives of three dangerously lost people…and the ominous haven they find when they find each other.

Jean is a house sitter at the end of a dreary career. Steph is nine months pregnant and on the run. And Michael is a thief. Through a mixture of deceit, good luck, and misfortune, these three damaged loners have come together at a secluded country home called Walden Manor. Now all three have found what they needed most: a new beginning, a little kindness, a little love. Living off the manor’s riches, tending its grounds and gardens, they leave the outside world far behind and build a happiness so long denied them. That is, until the first unexpected visitor arrives...igniting a chain reaction that is at once spellbinding and disastrous.

A stunning, thought-provoking crime novel of chilling moral complexity, Half Broken Things is a gripping, haunting exploration of love and our need for it, of the damage done when we go long without it, and the deeds we might be driven to in its name.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. British author Joss's brilliantly conceived, finely executed novel, which captured the CWA's Silver Dagger Award, offers psychological suspense of the highest order. The catalyst for a trio of misfits is Jean, a 64-year-old housesitter on the verge of forced retirement. Her last assignment is lengthy: nine months alone at an isolated country house, Walden Manor, whose wealthy owners are abroad for an extended stay. Jean's first casual liberties with the house are almost accidental. Then, as she begins to think of the place as home, she becomes bolder. She welcomes Michael, a middle-aged, less-than-successful thief, who becomes her "lost" son, and the pregnant, unmarried and abused Steph, who becomes her daughter-in-law. In Joss's capable hands, these three lonely losers begin to craft a family life. Even as they use another's property to do so, they're as appealing as they are appalling. How long will their idyll last? How far will they go to preserve it? What crimes are too great? This is a must-read. Joss is also the author of the Sara Selkirk mystery series (Fruitful Bodies, etc.).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Sixty-year-old Jean has no friends or family, a dead-end career as a house sitter, and nothing to look forward to but death. Things change when she lands an assignment house-sitting Walden Manor, a lovely country estate. Shortly after arriving, Jean decides, in a fit of pique and rebellion, to ignore the owners' strict list of instructions and treat the house as her own. ?All she needs is someone with whom to enjoy her "new home." Help arrives in the form of Michael and Steph, whose lives have been nearly as luckless and devoid of love as Jean's. The trio soon forms an unlikely family, finding heretofore unknown contentment and happiness. But then outside forces intrude, and while, at first, the three use deceit and evasion to hold onto their fantasy life, they are soon forced to employ darker methods. The story can have only one ending, but when it arrives, it's still a horrible shock. This is an extraordinary book--dark, painful, thought-provoking, and disturbing. Joss' masterful narrative delivers a provocative examination of good and evil, the nature of love, and the infinite variety of human behavior. Emily Melton
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Delta; (3rd) edition (July 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0440242444
• ISBN-13: 978-0440242444
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Visit Morag's website at www.moragjoss.com

Morag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. She read English at St Andrews University and then studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.
In 1996 she won an award in a national competition with her first short story. Starting to write was, she says, "discovering a lifelong ambition I didn't know I had."
The first of her three Sara Selkirk novels, FUNERAL MUSIC, was nominated for a Dilys Award by the American Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. She's also the author the 2003 Silver Dagger winner HALF BROKEN THINGS, which was adapted for UK national television and starred Penelope Wilton (available on DVD), and of THE NIGHT FOLLOWING, which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination for Best Novel 2009.
Morag Joss was a Heinrich Böll writer in residence on Achill Island, Ireland, in 2008, where she wrote part of her seventh novel, AMONG THE MISSING, due for USA publication in autumn 2010.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "I would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep us all together." October 7, 2005

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Jean, a sixty-four-year-old spinster, is working her final job as a house-sitter before she retires, tending the lovely, large Walden Manor, not far from Bath. The owners, who will be in Europe from January through August, have locked certain rooms, attested to the inventory, and established rules governing what can and cannot be done on the premises. Knowing this is her last job, Jean decides to flout the rules, living as if she were truly the lady of the manor, opening locked rooms, the wine cellar and freezer, and the family's personal spaces. Within a week, she has invited her "son" Michael to move in, and he has brought with him the pregnant Steph, who is about to give birth. Bonding into a close-knit "family," these social outcasts make themselves at home--for the first time in their lives.

Jean, writing a first person narrative at the end of her stay, instantly creates suspense when she reveals that there are "only eleven more days," and that she "does not plan to offer excuses for what we have done." Through flashbacks, we come to know her family background, learning of her childhood, her psychological and emotional abuse, her dysfunctional relationship with her demanding Mother, and her need for closeness. Michael, her "son," now "working" as a thief, is similarly needy, having survived an equally horrific childhood. Steph, the third lost soul, is an abused teenager--pregnant, rejected, and homeless.

The characters, though off-beat when taken separately, become absurd when they start behaving as a family. Living apart from society's rules, they begin acting to protect themselves and their lifestyle at Walden Manor. Jean speaks for all when she says, "I would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep us all together," and the reader has reason to believe her.

As the characters' self-protective actions become more extreme, the novel changes from suspenseful psychological horror to the blackest of black-humored farce--some of the darkest humor I've read since Molly Keane's Time After Time. Joss has filled the novel with minute descriptions of her odd characters in the novel's early pages, creating chilling suspense while stimulating reader empathy with the characters. In the second half of the novel, however, the reader realizes that these characters are more than just "odd," as they engage in increasingly outrageous scenes. The pace accelerates, and the author's mordant humor is fully unleashed.

Coincidences, ironies, understatements, and absurdity combine as Joss guides the novel into that twilight zone between genuine suspense and genuine humor, keeping the reader smiling from the tenterhooks. The novel's themes of time, family, home, and the need for love are fully developed--in unique, unexpected, and darkly humorous ways. n Mary Whipple

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful and haunting October 5, 2005

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

What desperate lengths would you go to for love --- especially if you've been forever deprived of it? This provocative question --- and its potentially disturbing ramifications --- is the explosive kindling that ignites a slow-burning fire engulfing the three bereft souls in HALF BROKEN THINGS. In this dark psychological thriller, awarded a prestigious Silver Dagger Award by the Crime Writers' Association, Scottish author Morag Joss explores the bottomless depths of human loneliness when the lives of three incongruous misfits collide in the British countryside.

On the surface, Jean, Michael and Steph appear to share little in common other than marginalized lives and childhoods marked by abandonment, abuse and disillusionment. Sixty-four-year-old housesitter Jean has forged a meager and solitary existence out of watching over the beloved possessions of others during their absences. Meanwhile, friendless and penniless loner Michael is reduced to stealing religious artifacts from churches in order to subsist on canned soup in a dingy, freezing apartment.

In a fated encounter, he crosses paths with the pregnant and jobless young Steph at the exact moment her lifelong inertia suddenly gives way to an impulsive decision to flee her abusive boyfriend. Short on options, she foists herself on the nearest person at hand, who happens to be Michael. Preoccupied with his own dire circumstances, he reluctantly acquiesces into letting her settle into his apartment and eventually into his heart.

Meanwhile, Jean faces the specter of mandatory retirement after her current eight-month contract ends housesitting the stately Walden Manor. The bleak prospect of being put out to pasture weakens her grip on reality and she indulgently assumes proxy ownership of the house, taking inappropriate liberties with its possessions. But even this misguided attempt to achieve a sense of belonging is not enough to stave off her emptiness, so she invents a son whom she'd given up for adoption and places an advertisement seeking to find him.

When Michael, given up for adoption by a mother he never knew, chances upon the ad, the wheels of fate are set again in motion. Though he realizes immediately upon meeting Jean that she cannot be his mother, the desperation of both supercedes reality and this implicit acknowledgment forms the basis for their surrogate family. Walden Manor draws Michael and Steph in with welcoming and bountiful arms, providing much-needed sustenance and a respite from their hand-to-mouth financial struggles. Insulated from the pressures of the outside world, the incongruous new family creates an idyllic-seeming existence until reality slowly and inexorably intercedes.

The gradual unraveling of their elaborately concocted fantasy world is accelerated by the unexpected appearance of someone from Michael's past and the impending return of the rightful owners of Walden Manor. These encroaching threats set in motion a dramatic and irrevocable chain of events that hurtles the novel toward its final shocking crescendo.

The carefully calibrated manner in which the author allows events to unfold creates an ominous and pervasive tension as she descends us into greater and greater depths of suspense and disbelief with each turn of the page. Equally as skillful, Joss manages to make each increasingly appalling occurrence appear frighteningly justifiable given the circumstances. Just as she crafts a narrative that both defies belief yet seems completely plausible, she uses that same gifted sleight of hand on her characters, who simultaneously repel us by their desperate actions while also inspiring empathy and even likeability.

While Morag Joss has written three previously well-received books in her Sara Selkirk mystery series, HALF BROKEN THINGS is her first stand-alone effort and it firmly cements her reputation as a master of psychological suspense on par with Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell. Her ability to penetrate deep into the hearts, minds and motivations of her characters enables her to portray the doomed inevitability of their half-broken lives to powerful and haunting effect.

--- Reviewed by Joni Rendon

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fragile: Handle With Care August 7, 2006

By Tom S. TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Three lonely, damaged social outcasts happen upon each other in a big, empty country house that does not belong to them, and together they create something like a family. Their fantasy existence cannot last, of course, and when harsh reality intrudes in their "home," they take desperate measures to protect and preserve the only happiness they've ever known. This portrait of quiet horror and escalating madness will leave you feeling shocked, drained--and oddly uplifted.

Morag Joss is the latest addition to a select group of suspense writers, the ones whose mysteries are set in the delicate landscapes of the human mind and heart. This strange, compelling novel will remind readers of Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters, and the late Patricia Highsmith. Yes, she's that good. If you like those writers, try this.

PS: Her new novel, PUCCINI'S GHOSTS, is also very good.