Synopsis
A woman wakes up in the middle of the night. A strange man is in her bedroom. She lies there in silence, paralyzed with fear. The woman is an author and the man one of her characters, one in a long line that waits in her driveway for the time when she’ll tell their stories. He is so desperate that he has resorted to breaking into her house and demanding that she begin. He, the author decides, is named Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, works in a gallery. He lives a quiet, orderly life and likes it that way—no demands, no unpleasantness. Until the icy winter morning when a young drug addict, skinny and fragile, walks into the gallery. Alvar gives her a cup of coffee to warm her up. And then one day she appears on his doorstep. Broken is an unconventional, subtle, and disturbing mystery from a master of the form.
The Washington Post - Richard Lipez
In one sense, Broken isn't even a mystery. The only crime committed comes late in the story; it's almost anti-climactic. Yet Fossum builds suspense almost entirely through the ongoing collision of Alvar…and young Lindys, a damaged wraith of a girl who constantly tests him with her crude demands…The "broken" of the title refers to a painting of a collapsed bridge that Alvar had yearned to buy before Lindys barged in and ran through nearly all his money. It's an obvious but apt metaphor for the kinds of injured lives that Karin Fossum evokes so brilliantly in her Inspector Sejer mysteries and now in this odd, memorable book.