‘Broken House’ by Louisa Scarr

Published by Canelo Crime,
16 October 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-83598-077-4

Third in the author’s PC Lucy Halliday series, Broken House features not only the engaging police dog handler Lucy but also her two lovable dogs: Moss, a black spaniel specialist search dog, and Iggy, a German shepherd trained to track and attack. In this series, Scarr writes in the popular genre of “K-9” —stories in which canine companions feature prominently.  

 

Inevitably, Lucy boasts a rich and complicated backstory. Lucy’s past with its unresolved issues figures largely in this third instalment, represented in her conflict with the man whose team she’s assigned to at the beginning of the story to investigate the case of a missing person, Lauren Shaw, daughter of a well-known country and western singer.

 

DCI Jack Ellis is a boss but also a friend and a potential future love interest, although in Broken House, her boyfriend is Pete Nash, a fellow dog handler. In the first book of the series, Ellis had led the team investigating the case of Lucy’s husband, Nico, an investigative journalist, missing and presumed dead, whose body subsequently was found in woodland. The trauma of the case made Lucy decide to relinquish her position as a DI and to retrain as a PC dog handler.

 

Three years later—the time of the action of Broken House—Jack and Lucy are estranged. Investigating Nico’s death, Jack learned he had confessed to his killer that Lucy’s difficult mother, who’d died when she was a child, had had another daughter—Lucy’s sister—of whose existence Lucy has always been completely unaware. Wanting to protect his friend, Jack conceals the fact from Lucy, and on subsequently learning of his deception, Lucy considers it unforgivable. At forty, Lucy imagines it’s too late to start a relationship with an unknown sibling, but the reader is aware she is lying to herself.

As for the case Ellis and Lucy are currently investigating, attractive Lauren Shaw disappeared from her large home in Hampshire ten years earlier. Her husband, Declan Cox, had claimed at the time that she had run off with a lover, and the police accepted his theory. But a schoolboy’s chance discovery of a memory stick in the overgrown garden of the mansion Bracken House, empty for ten years and now, in its now derelict state, dubbed locally as ‘Broken House,’ casts serious doubt on Cox’s supposition. It includes footage of Lauren, timestamped a week after she was reported missing, apparently being raped by a threatening male figure. Moss quickly finds human remains in the garden, and they are assumed to be Lauren’s.

The cast of characters includes not only Jack and Lucy and Lauren’s husband but Maggie Shaw, Lauren’s older sister, and Brett, Maggie’s former husband. They are all flawed individuals hiding dark secrets of their own, enjoyably complicating the story. Scarr ramps up the tension with the stalemate between Lucy and Jack—will they or won’t they ever reconcile? — and the question whether Lucy will, after all, seek out the sister she’d never known about. Iggy and Moss, naturally, also play an important part in the action.

Broken House features so many twists, turns, and unexpected revelations that the reader is pleasurably absorbed from start to finish in trying to guess the killer. Scarr writes in lucid prose and provides us with a surprise ending. Recommended.
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Reviewer: Wendy Jones Nakanishi/aka Lea O’Harra. 

Louisa Scarr studied Psychology at the University of Southampton and has lived in and around the city ever since. She works as a freelance copywriter and editor, and when she's not writing, she can be found pounding the streets in running shoes or swimming in muddy lakes.  

Lea O’Harra.  An American by birth, did her postgraduate work in Britain – an MA in Lancaster and a doctorate at Edinburgh – and worked full-time for 36 years at a Japanese university. Since retiring in March 2020, she has spent part of each year in Lancaster and part in Takamatsu on Shikoku Island, her second home, with occasional visits to the States to see family and friends. An avid reader of crime fiction since childhood, as a university professor she wrote academic articles on it as a literary genre and then decided to try her hand at composing such stories herself, publishing the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue mystery series’ comprising three murder mysteries set in rural, contemporary Japan. She has also published two standalone crime fiction novels.