Character profile: Detective Joe Cashin

Detective Sergeant Joe Cashin is the protagonist in Peter Temple’s novel, The Broken Shore. He represents an ordinary man who stands up to some extraordinary issues: police corruption, racism, a paedaphilia ring, social class discrimination and his own personal battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. But he is far from a perfect human being. This resource provides extracts, asks students to identify his relationship to other characters in the novel and analyse the impact of the PTSD on him and his work as a police officer.