A Song for the Brokenhearted

DS Cathal Breen is recovering from his on the job injury at the family farm of his former partner, Helen Tozer. Helen is still smarting from having to give up her career at New Scotland Yard to have to take care of her family. While Breen recovers, he and Helen look into the case of her murdered sister, Alexandra, The teen was killed when she was 16, but there were never any arrests. At the time, police were interested in James Fletchet, as he and Alexandra were romantically involved, but Fletchet’s connections ensure he was never charged. Now, Helen and Breen want the case reopened and Fletchet is their number one suspect, but they get stonewalled by their own department, so the two set out on their own to make sure Fletchet pays. Set in the late 1960’s this story is a good reminder that the “good old days” weren’t that good. Helen’s career is downplayed and dismissed because she’s a woman and Breen discovers first hand how someone who looks like a hippie is treated when he goes undercover.

Breen has been shot in the line of duty and is staying at Tozer's parent's house. She's trying to keep him quiet so he will heal. He's not a good patient. When she tells him of her sister's murder which has never been solved, he finally has something he can look into to keep himself busy. He'll wish he hadn't taken it on...

Mulholland Books and Net Galley allowed me to read this book for review (thank you). It will be published January 19th, so you can grab a copy then.

Breen is a very persistent cop. He keeps kicking up the leaves and looking at the dirt under them. The dead girl was only 16. She knew her way around sexually and she liked the power it gave her with men. If she'd stuck with boys her age, it might have worked out better.

The men in the case were partly cops, partly land owners. They had been in a war in Africa and saw and did terrible things there. How that can tie to a young girl's death in London is unknown.

Breen has another problem. He's attracted to Tozer. He's slept with her once and manages to do so again while at the house. He met her while she was a cop; now she helps her parents on the farm. He thinks he might be in love with her. She's standoffish and wants nothing to do with marriage.

He's trying to deal with Helen, find the killer, and help the Tozer family with a young girl they have taken in. She got involved with drugs and now she's helping them farm and getting healthier and happier by the day. She's also taking the place of the daughter that died and making most of the family happy again. Helen isn't happy but she doesn't seem to be ever. She's an interesting creature.

The killer is unusual, the case is complex and the killings are brutal. The investigations has many layers and when new people start dying with the same MO, the case spikes in importance. The ending is tense and thrilling. You'll be thinking about this story for a while.

*Review to be posted to my blog, January 14, 2016.

With A Song for the Brokenhearted William Shaw wraps up the Breen & Tozer mystery trilogy and I’m left hoping to read more about these characters. A trilogy can become a series, right? This book was everything that I hoped it would be: awesome characters, occasional humour, and a mystery that not only holds a personal connection for the main characters but also sheds light on events of an international nature.

A Song for the Brokenhearted picks up soon after the events of the previous book, Kings of London. Breen is recuperating after being injured on the job and ex-policewoman, Helen Tozer, has brought Breen back to her family’s farm to recover. Going a bit stir crazy, Breen is not exactly unhappy when Helen nudges him into looking into her sister Alexandra's unsolved murder. Surprisingly, Alexandra's murder has an unexpected connection to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Having loved She’s Leaving Home and Kings of London, I had really, really high expectations of the final book in this retro mystery series. From the start, I have loved being immersed in the 1960s culture and fascinated by the characters of Breen and Tozer. Historical events of the 1960s continue to be present in the Brokenhearted, and the British presence in Kenya during this period is explored. The history of the British in Kenya is not glossed over as one of the murder suspects, James Fletchet, lived in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, actively taking part in “screening” locals. It’s not a pretty past, but it adds an unexpected political bent to the novel, which is generally not something that I expect in the mystery genre. The details of international events are skillfully interwoven with the mystery, giving the reader a fantastic sense of place and time. The fact that 1960s London comes alive in this trilogy is a big draw for me and it will appeal to mystery readers who are looking for a read that is more than just procedural information, after all, Breen and Tozer are not even officially on the case.

The characters of Breen and Tozer continue to be fabulous; they are what keep me coming back to these books. Both Cathal Breen and Helen Tozer are such human characters. Breen is definitely not a super detective, yet he stands in sharp contrast to his corrupt fellow official. Helen Tozer, unlike Breen, is comfortable with the fast changing world; she embraces the change that society is experiencing and is all the more frustrated when she’s forced to quit her job and return to help her parents on their farm. The fact that Breen and Tozer are so opposite in terms of the worldview makes their strange relationship all the more compelling. Breen’s more of an old fashioned kind of guy, so his attraction to Tozer is a bit fraught; however, I think with Brokenhearted you can really see how Breen has grow and embraced some of the change that’s sweeping the nation. There are some big changes ahead for both Breen and Tozer and it's how they deal with personal complications during a murder investigation that is so compelling.

Ultimately, Brokenhearted gives readers a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. Many of the loose ends from the previous books are wrapped up; however, I think the author leaves enough room for future books to be written. If there is anything that disappointed me about Brokenhearted, it is the ambiguous nature of the ending and the fact that, as it stands, there will be no more books featuring these characters. Ambiguity aside, if you've enjoyed the first two books in this trilogy there is no question that you will love it's finale.

"Violence had its echo.”

A Song for the Brokenhearted is the third volume in William Shaw’s Breen and Tozer trilogy. The dynamic between these two main characters, both outsiders for different reasons, are a major draw for this series. CID CS Cathal Breen, known as ‘Paddy’ doesn’t ‘fit in’ with his Division, and Helen Tozer, never taken seriously by her male colleagues, is a young female policewoman, Temporary Detective (“Probationer,”) who hails from the countryside. In the first book, She’s Leaving Home, the mismatched team of Breen and Tozer tackle a murder case, in The Kings of London Breen investigates the murder of a wealthy art collector, and this final book in the trilogy, opens at the Tozer farm. Helen has given up on her career and has returned home to work. Breen is there for.. well read The Kings of London for that one.

The series is unique for its 60s setting–Tozer, in the first book is the source of many sexist comments and expectations from her male workmates who think she exists to make their coffee and giggle over their jokes, and meanwhile Beatlemania rages through Britain. Shaw’s characters are firmly rooted in their time, so we have speculation about why a nice girl like Helen Tozer wants to be a policewoman, but the answer to that lies in her past.

That brings me to A Song for the Brokenhearted–anyone who read the first and second books in the series knows that Tozer is haunted by the brutal, unsolved slaying of her sister Alexandra. This vicious crime is the root cause for Tozer’s career choice, and the murder is so deeply embedded in the character of Helen Tozer that we know its solution had to occur somewhere in the series. With Breen bored out of his mind on the Tozer farm, he grasps how the unsolved murder permeates the household. He begins poking around in the cold murder case.

Murdered people never really go away. They stay with you. If you never discover why they were killed, or who the killer was, it’s worse. As a policeman he knew this from the families and friends of the victims that he’d met over the years. Now living here, the dead girl was all around him in this house.

Using Tozer’s influence, he accesses the old files and discovers that information regarding a key witness, one of Alexandra’s many secret lovers, is missing from storage. After discovering the name of this witness, a wealthy local married man, Breen begins digging into the case, and the past comes back with swift retribution.

As with the previous two books in the series, the author does an excellent job of recreating the 60s atmosphere without nostalgia, and since this entry in the trilogy is set, mostly, in the countryside, the 60s references are more social values than star power, so at one point, for example, we see a pregnant woman puffing away at a cigarette–funny how that seems shocking these days, and hear about jury selection for the Kray brothers’ trial. Shaw presents the generational gap between Breen and Tozer as the world of the 50s clashing with the 60s. This is a world in flux with rapidly shifting values. In this novel, there’s an additional element of colonialism, and the Dirty business carried out in Kenya washes up in unexpected ways in spite of, apparently, being swept under the rug.

Review copy.