Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor series has been a mainstay of my professional and pleasure reading since the Shamus Award-winning The Guards (2001). The series follows the downfall of Galway cop Taylor and his efforts to climb out of the (very deep) hole he created for himself with his alcoholism and his exceptionally poor choices of friends and lovers. The opening pages of In the Galway Silence find Taylor a little more settled than before: There is a romantic interest that tentatively seems to be working out, a bit of money in the bank, and he has the drinking under control for the most part. When bad stuff starts happening, only Taylor's harshest critic could assign the responsibility to him—although it goes without saying that Taylor is his own harshest critic. One child is kidnapped and brutalized, another murdered, and a killer is on the rampage. Taylor knows who the culprit is and is powerless to do anything about it. But you can push Taylor only so far, and when he snaps, he's gonna go bat%#@& crazy, which is the high point of Bruen's books for most readers. Taut plotting, a staccato first-person narrative, deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters and the windy, wet Irish milieu conspire to put Bruen's novels into a class by themselves.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

 

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Asked to investigate the murder of twin brothers even as he tends the nine-year-old of his new girlfriend, Jameson-downing former cop Jack Taylor encounters a stealthy vigilante assassin nicknamed Silence. From the multi-award-winning top dog of Irish crime fiction.

Powered by nonstop action and acerbic wit, Edgar-finalist Bruen's 14th novel featuring ex-cop Jack Taylor (after 2017's The Ghosts of Galway) is—like the pints of Guinness that the saga's existentially tortured, pill-popping antihero consumes on a daily basis—unfathomably dark. When the woman he cares for, a speech therapist named Marion, leaves Ireland to attend a conference in the States, so too does any semblance of stability or contentment in Taylor's life. He's asked to investigate the horrific murder of a man's adult twin sons, two morally bankrupt Menendez brothers wannabes; Marion's bratty nine-year old son is abducted by a pedophile; his ex-wife shows up with a daughter he didn't know he had; and a serial killer known as the Silence begins a deadly chess game in which he's an unwilling participant. Bloody chaos ensues. Readers who can get past the decidedly nonlinear and at times downright muddled narrative will find a deeply flawed but endear- ing character whose suffering is both tragic and transformative. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (Nov.)