Would you kill to protect your children? Almost every parent would answer yes. In thriller movies and TV shows where a child is in jeopardy, the climax usually happens as the parent rescues the child and kills the kidnapper. And the audience applauds as the credits roll.
But what happens afterward? What does killing someone—no matter how justified—do to a person’s soul?
In The Break-In, Katherine Faulkner’s thoughtful, propulsive follow-up to The Other Mothers (reviewed here), Alice is defending her home, her child, and her friends from a deranged man who broke into her house, and ends up killing him. But although she’s quickly absolved of a crime, Alice is burdened by the weight of taking a life. Who was this young man, and how did he end up in her home? Alice finds herself befriending her victim’s mother, who pretends not to know who she is. As Alice gets more involved in the life of her victim, his mother, and his twin sister, she starts to realize that the break-in wasn’t as random as it seemed.
Faulkner is an amazing writer, and the depth of her prose takes a story that could easily have been a shallow twist-o-rama with a predictable ending and creates a meaningful look at issues around class, privilege, sexism, and who counts in society. Living in a million-dollar home in a gentrified part of London, Alice is dismayed by her portrayal in press accounts of the break-in and killing. As she investigates what actually happened, she is forced to confront her own ignorance and culpability in the world around her and in her circle.
Is the ending predictable? Yes… most readers of domestic suspense know the organizing question of the book, and who the villain will turn out to be. But as Faulkner excavates the layers to her story, she lays bare exactly how privilege allows wealthy white men to be excused for incompetence, victimize women, and continue to receive accolades unless and until someone more powerful than he is calls him out. The Break-In is much more than a why-done-it, it’s an indictment of an entire class of people-- as such, it will be a hard read for those who benefit from the current structure of society.
With her third book, Katherine Faulkner establishes herself as one of the most thoughtful, insightful, and perceptive authors working on class and sexism issues in the mystery and crime genre. Her commentary may be cloaked in fiction, but the truth of her words transcends her stories. While Faulkner is a British writer who sets her books in London, anyone wondering how Epstein got away with it for so long—and how so many are still getting away with it—will see answers here.
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