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The latest Jack Taylor novel from the Godfather of Irish noir Jack Taylor has never quite been able get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom. Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the local Garda is murdered. After another Guard is found dead, and then another, Taylor's old colleagues from the force implore him to take on the case. The plot is one big game, and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious team: a trio of young killers with very different styles, but who are united in their common desire to take down Jack Taylor. Their ...
The impossible has happened: Jack Taylor is living clean and dating a mature woman. Rumour suggests he is even attending mass... The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that 'The Dramatist', a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns Jack's refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he's maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss. The fourth Jack Taylow novel.
An Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel. Praised by authors and critics around the globe, The Guards is the first novel in the Jack Taylor series and heralded the arrival of prominent Irish writer Ken Bruen as an essential voice in contemporary crime fiction. Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana--The Guards, Ireland's police force--and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. In his sober moments Jack aspires to become Ireland's best private investigator, not to mention its first--Irish history, full of betrayal and espionage, discourages any profession so closely related to in...
Jack Taylor has finally traded in his violent life in Galway for a quiet retirement in the country. But on a day trip back into the city, Jack is hit by a truck and left in a coma, mysteriously without a scratch on him. When he awakens weeks later, he finds Ireland in a frenzy over the so-called 'Miracle of Galway'. People have become convinced that the two children who tended to him are saintly, and the site of the accident sacred. The Catholic Church isn't so sure, and Jack is commissioned to help find the children – to verify the miracle or expose the stunt. But Jack isn't the only one looking for these children, and he'll need all the help he can get – and a stiff drink of Jameson – once he finds them. Praise for Ken Bruen: 'Bruen is an Emerald Noir maestro' – DUBLIN SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 'The best-kept literary secret in Ireland' – INDEPENDENT 'One of Ireland's most original voices in crime fiction' – IRISH INDEPENDENT 'Bruen's visceral writing and anger brings a fierce, almost surreal intensity to this mad story of a heretical book that turns up in Galway' – METRO
A portrait of the PI from the Shamus Award winner who created him: “They don’t come much tougher than Ken Bruen’s Irish roughneck, Jack Taylor.” —The New York Times Book Review In this short work, Edgar Award finalist Ken Bruen—“a Celtic Dashiell Hammett”—takes us deeper into his character Jack Taylor, formerly of Ireland’s police force, the Garda Síochána, now a living-on-the-edge private detective (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “Jack, as ja series know all too well, has a gift for blarney, for plain speaking, for poetic melancholy, for downing shots of Jameson’s [sic] without ice, and for pregnant one-word paragraphs.” —Kirkus Reviews “Bruen’s storytelling style, a stream-of-consciousness mix of prose and verse, strips away Galway’s tourist-board facade and offers a darkly comic social commentary.” —Booklist “The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel.” —The Irish Times “[Taylor’s] voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.” —The Seattle Times
Someone is scraping the scum off the streets of Galway, and they want Jack Taylor to get involved. A drug pusher, a rapist, a loan shark, all targeted in what look like vigilante attacks. And the killer is writing to Jack, signing their name: C-33. Jack has had enough. He doesn’t need the money, and doesn’t want to get involved. But when his friend Stewart gets drawn in, it seems he isn’t been given a choice. In the meantime, Jack is being courted by Reardon, a charismatic billionaire intent on buying up much of Galway, and begins a tentative relationship with Reardon’s PR director, Kelly. Caught between heaven and hell, there’s only one path for Jack Taylor to take: Purgatory.
Examines the representations of migration in African literature, film, and other visual media, with an eye to the stylistic features of these works as well as their contributions to debates on migration
Some people help the less fortunate. Others kill them. Evil has many guises. Jack Taylor has encountered most of them but nothing before has ever truly terrified him until a group called Headstone rears its ugly head. An elderly priest is viciously beaten until nearly dead. A special needs boy is brutally attacked. A series of seemingly random, insane, violent events even has the Guards shaken. Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this coterie of evil intends to act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack's life as an act of appalling violence alerts him to the horror enveloping Galway. Accepting the power of Headstone, Jack realizes that in order to fight back he must relinquish the remaining shreds of what has made him human - knowledge that may have come too late to prevent an act of such ferocious evil that the whole country would be changed forever - and in the worst way. With awful clarity, Jack knows that not only might he be powerless to stop it but that he may not have the grit needed to even face it.
Four... the one number Jack Taylor can't get out of his head.Four... the number of hours he's trained each day.Four... the number of people motivating him to fightThe challenge of the Four Seasons is ready, but Jack isn't. As the next dreamer to be sacrificed to the elements, he must prove himself. However, someone is intent on sabotaging Jack. Could it be the powerful judge holding a grudge against Jack's father, a vengeful holiday spirit with a dark past... or a new threat unlike any he's met before? The battle with the Sandman left the residents of Cloud City wounded and wary of Jack Taylor, who unwittingly helped the Sandman escape. For his involvement, Jack's been sentenced to follow in...
“The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel . . . writes in machine gun fashion . . . reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.” —The Irish Times In Green Hell, Bruen’s dark angel of a protagonist has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Guards, is ancient history. But Jack isn’t about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only to...