Half Broken Things by Morag Joss

Half Broken Things is advertised as a "novel of suspense." It won an award from the Crime Writers Association, and I picked it up ready to puzzle through an unsolved mystery. But this book is not a whodunit; if there are murders at its center (and, my goodness, there are!), there is never a question of who commits them. Instead, the suspense builds around the fates of the three protagonists, who, throughout the course of the book, commit theft--and grisly murders. What will happen to them? And what should happen to them--what do they deserve? 

For these characters are as sympathetic as they are sinister. They have no money, no friends, and, until they find one another, no hope that their lives can change. Jean is an aging house-sitter who has been given notice; she has no family or home of her own, subsisting entirely in the houses she watches, often for months at a time. Michael is an unsuccessful thief who is deep in debt and paralyzed by chronic depression. As a character, Steph is the most conventional (she is also the least convincing): she's pregnant, and her boyfriend is abusive. Author Morag Joss spends the first half of the book laboring to show us just how lonely these people are. 

This set-up is essential. By a series of fabulous coincidences, à la Charles Dickens, these three loners find one another: they make a home together in Jean's current residence, an idyllic country mansion whose owners are on an extended holiday. For the first time, they see what it is to live a comfortable life. They are not greedy; they do not take more than they need; many would call simple the life they see as luxurious. But it is clearly their togetherness, their devotion to one another, that brings them the most happiness, and it is hard not to share in the sheer joy they feel at alleviating their loneliness. It is almost difficult to remember that they are, in order to maintain this neat little life, committing fraud, theft, and--as time passes--cold-blooded murder. 

It seems clear that their life is unsustainable: the residents will return to their house, eventually, and the secretly killed will be reported missing. But it seems equally clear that they are not going to be arrested like common criminals, put on trial, and thrown in jail. In the world of their new life, there is no room for that kind of mundane reality. Until the last few pages of the book, I genuinely had no idea how it would end (and the ending is surprising in just the right way: you realize what will happen the moment before it actually does). I enjoyed the ambiguity because it also forced the reader into a moral quandary: what possible outcome will serve justice? In the end, of course, there is no justice but the poetic kind--but it is so deliciously rendered that it hardly matters.