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Half Broken Things
Havana Red
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Murder by the Book
The 25th Hour
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Degrees of Murder
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Hysteria: Volume 1
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Follow Me Closely
And They Say You Can't Buy Happiness
Joy to the World?
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Average customer rating:

Layer after disturbing layer
Reminded me of Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived In The Castle"
Finding other peoples' happiness.
Fragile: Handle With Care
"We have the perfect lady, flexible, no ties, usually available."

Half Broken Things
Morag Joss
Manufacturer: Delta
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Psychological & Suspense | Thrillers | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books

Suspense | Thrillers | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0440242444
Release Date: 2006-07-25

Book Description

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.

Download Description

January

Walden Manor August

This is not what it might look like. We’re quiet people. As a general rule extraordinary things do not happen to us, and we are not the type to go looking for them. But so much has happened since January, and I started it. Things began to happen, things I must have brought about somehow without quite foreseeing where they would lead. So I feel I must explain, late in the day though it is. I’m going to set out, as clearly as I can, in the order in which they occurred, the things that have happened here. And I shall find it difficult because I was brought up not to draw attention to myself and I’ve never been considered a forthcoming person, never being one to splurge out on anything, least of all great long explanations. Indeed, Mother always described me as secretive. But that was because, with her, I came to expect my reasons for things to be not so much misunderstood as overlooked or mislaid, and so early on I stopped giving them.

Father was usually quiet, too. When I think back to the sounds of the house in Oakfield Avenue where I grew up, I do not remember voices. I think we sighed or cleared our throats more often than we spoke words. I remember mainly the tick of Father’s longcase clock in the dining room we never ate in, and then after the clock had gone, a particular silence throughout the house that I thought of as a shade of grey. And much later when I was an adult, still there looking after Mother, the most regular sound was the microwave. It pinged a dozen times a day. In fact, until recently, whenever I heard a certain tone of ping, in a shop or somewhere like that, I would immediately smell boiling milk. But when I was a child there was just the clock, with silences in between.

Mother had few words herself. She often went about the house as if she were harbouring unsaid things at great personal cost, with a locked look on her mouth. That being so, I suppose Father and I felt unable to open our own mouths very much. What happens to all the things you might say or want to say, but don’t? Well, they don’t lie about in your head indefinitely, waiting to be let out. For a time they may stay there quite patiently, but then they shuffle off and fade until you can’t locate them any more, and you realise they’re not coming back. By then you’re past caring.

So I grew to think of myself as someone not in particular need of words. I did not acquire the habit of calling them up; not many at a time at least, not even to myself in my own head. Things in my head had been very quiet for a long time, before all this.

But I have been wrong about this aspect of myself, as about others. I find that there are words there after all. Now that I need them, my words have come crowding back, perhaps because I have a limited time in which to get them all down (today is the 20th, so only eleven more days). I am pleased that my hands remember the old touch-typing moves without seeming to involve me at all. The letters are hitting the paper in this old typewriter almost as if they were being shot out of my finger-ends. Which is just as well, because I’m busy enough dealing with all the clamouring words that are flinging themselves around in my head, fighting over which gets fired out first. I’m in a hurry to let them loose. I want to explain, because it is suddenly extremely urgent and important that, in the end, we are not misunderstood.

And I shall try to put down not just what, but why things have happened and why none of it could have turned out any differently. Until now I really haven’t thought about the why. Time’s the thing. I haven’t had time, not time of the right kind, to ask myself why things have gone the way they have. I’ve been too busy being happy; even now I’m happy, although t

Customer Reviews:

Layer after disturbing layer.......2007-06-11

A very disturbing look into a set of troubled minds. Though it's classed with mystery/crime writing, it was a bit different from most of the things I've read from the genre. The author did a good job of making me want to continue with the story despite that there was nothing at all admirable about the main characters. They really never struck me as all that sympathetic and are, in fact, rather symptomatic of those who like to blame the world for their misfortunes. And yet I found it hard to turn away from them because Joss does such an excellent job of drawing her reader into her characters' twisted minds and I never ceased to be amazed at how skilled at rationalization they all were. One things for sure, this is a novel to make you think.

Reminded me of Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived In The Castle".......2007-01-21

Jackson's classic novel of isolation and murder and madness among those with few ties to reality came to mind as I read HALF BROKEN THINGS.

This is the type of book you "settle into" -- it doesn't sweep you away like much modern commerical fiction. But once you settle in, you're in for a great story with a perfect ending!

Be sure and visit Jackson's CASTLE...and Ruth Rendell's A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES if you liked this book!

Finding other peoples' happiness........2007-01-13

This is an eerily creepy book. Morag Joss has an uncanny ability to tickle the interface between the autonomic nervous system and higher cognitive functions. I couldn't decide whether I was on the side of the "loser" characters or the mainstream owners.

Fragile: Handle With Care.......2006-08-08

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.

"We have the perfect lady, flexible, no ties, usually available.".......2006-05-05

Sixty-four-year old Jean is one of the unnoticed, a plain woman, in her eighteenth and final year as a housesitter. From a background of emotional poverty, Jean has muddled through the years, her mind too often her only companion, a condition that allows her illogical flights of fancy in her current situation as housesitter of Walden Manor. Her body not as spry as it was, Jean is faced with an insecure future, uncertain finances and the looming years without a real home or family: "The old Jean simply detached herself, rose up and disappeared into the steam, like a person dissolving into fog."

Writing a journal at the start of the novel, Jean puts the facts to paper, how she came to her current dilemma in this welcoming home, which she has inexplicably taken as her own while the owners are traveling. Resentful of the restrictions put upon her by the Standish-Cave's, Jean finds many doors locked, an implicit judgment of her untrustworthiness at best, or perhaps her standing as a mere caretaker of other people's things. Nursing a subtle rebellion, when she breaks a teapot containing the keys to the formerly unavailable rooms and private drawers, Jean is liberated from her position, slowing inhabiting the home: "People should have what they need, especially if they have to go without most of their lives." The next step, albeit bizarre, is almost inevitable: a family all her own.

When the others arrive, Michael and a pregnant Stephanie, Jean fills the house with expectations and generosity, hampered initially by a lack of funds, which the three of them overcome by means of careful and creative calculations. Formerly driven by lack, Jean's life theme has been "that good things, opportunity, security, affection, should come to me, if at all, only second-hand, and in second-rate scraps." Now her days are filled with family, if at the expense of others and a convoluted reasoning that allows them to pretend that they are of the manor born. Of course, this facile construction will come tumbling down when reality intrudes, but Jean, Michael and Steph are prepared to go to any lengths to maintain their small slice of happiness.

Like a twisted fairy tale, the story unfolds, three desperate people performing increasingly desperate acts, dedicated to the well-being of the family at all costs. By turns bizarre and gothic, Joss' untrammeled imagination gives birth to a poignant respite for three truly half-broken things who wander beyond the edge of reason, the demand for inclusion so fierce as to justify the most heinous acts. The house surrounds its new inhabitants with comforts and possibilities unavailable to them at any other time and place, even as reality impinges upon their contentment. The isolation at the manor is seductive, self-justification pervasive, the three pitting need against propriety in an astonishing tale of belonging at any cost. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

Average customer rating:

HALF BROKEN THINGS
M. JOSS
Manufacturer: HODDER
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S5W76M

Average customer rating:

Half Broken Things
Morag Joss
Manufacturer: Delacorte
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSMOYS

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