Galway Confidential - Ken Bruen

 

Galway Confidential is Ken Bruen's seventeenth Jack Taylor novel, but it is the first since A Galway Ephiphany was published during the catastrophic covid year of 2020. Appropriately enough, as this new glimpse into Jack's darkly chaotic world begins, Jack himself is just waking up from a coma of almost two year's duration. Jack wakes up into a world in which so much has changed that he can hardly believe his eyes. Some things, though, never seem to change no matter how much we wish they would. Those he can believe.

Jack is struggling to recall the near-fatal knife attack that preceded him being tossed into the river to drown, and he cannot recall at all the man who saved his life by pulling him from the river just in the nick of time. That man is now a fixture in Jack's life despite how utterly annoying Jack often finds him to be. But Jack owes him - and Jack always pays his debts.

Despite his brush with death, Jack's reputation on the street is still that of a man able and willing to go where the local police refuse, for reasons of their own, to go. When bad people need fixing, Jack Taylor is the man good people go to for the job. One thing that didn't change while Jack was enduring his long sleep is that there are plenty of bad people out there who need fixing. And two of them have just intruded on Jack's world. Their bad.

One of them is taking a hammer to the heads of Galway's nuns, and the other is burning alive homeless people. Jack is not having any of that.

Ken Bruen's Galway is a dark place in which no one can ever truly be trusted, least of all the police, the Church, and the government. It is a world in which despair, fear, and desperation are often the drivers, a world in which surprisingly effective alliances are sometimes formed between people who refuse to accept things as they are - people who fight back. 

Jack Taylor, a man who has been trying to drink himself to death for decades, is one of those people. His badge as a police officer of the Garda Síochána has been taken from him, he has watched his mother be manipulated by an unscrupulous priest for years, and he knows that successful politicians are never the best of us. Jack has done things he's not proud of, some of those things responsible for his seeming determination to kill himself with the booze. He has killed people to stop them from killing again. It is no wonder that the weak and the helpless come to Jack Taylor for help.

Jack Taylor is a good man.

Galway Confidential is filled with Ken Bruen's usual wit and stylistic quirks, and reading a Ken Bruen novel, dark and brutal as the world it is set in may be, is always fun. Galway Confidential is no exception.

Ken Bruen (Macmillan Publishers photo)

(Look for Galway Confidential on March 5, 2024.)

Galway Girl - Ken Bruen

Galway Girl, book number fourteen in Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, adds yet another brutal chapter to Jack Taylor’s long, dark history. Taylor is a former Irish cop with a history of mental illness who regularly drinks himself into the kind of stupor that can take days to recover from. The man has suffered the kind of personal loss that would have driven weaker men to suicide – but Jack Taylor is anything but a weak man. Nor is he a bad man.

What he is, though, is a cynic with a big mouth; a man who understands exactly how the real works and is not afraid to shout about it in public. Taylor can count the friends he still has in the Garda on fewer than half the fingers on one hand, and he gave up counting his active enemies on the force a long time ago. And while Galway is still very much a Catholic-Church-dominated city, Taylor has some very powerful enemies (particularly one who hopes to soon become a bishop) there, too. His few real friends are found among the regulars in Galway’s pubs. But most dangerous for the church, the Garda, and Galway’s criminals, Jack Taylor is still a do-gooder always willing to rush to the defense of those who can’t defend themselves.

But now members of the Garda are being assassinated one-by-one, and it looks like Taylor is somehow connected to the deaths. The killers are three young sociopaths who have bonded over their shared desire to destroy what little mental stability Taylor still has, and killing his ex-colleagues is just part of their longer-term plan. As the number of assassinations mount, the police turn to Taylor for help – much to the consternation of both sides.

Ken Bruen

But as usual in a Ken Bruen novel, the main plot is not the most important thing about Galway Girl; Bruen’s novels are more about atmosphere and character development than they are the main plot. Along the way, there are sometimes so many side plots being explored and resolved that the reader can easily forget what the main plot even is. Jack Taylor has a reputation on the streets (and he tries to make his meager living as one of Galway’s few private detectives) so it is common for him to receive visits from people afraid to go to the police for help. And, especially when those needing help are women or children, Taylor is always ready to drop everything else to see what he can do to help.

Bottom Line: Galway Girl is Irish noir at its best, a novel in which the city of Galway herself plays as important a role as any of the book’s characters. Surreal and dreamlike at times, the novel often requires a healthy suspension of disbelief to move one of its several plot lines forward, but that’s all just part of the fun for regular Ken Bruen readers. Bruen’s sparse and stylistically-unusual writing style is the icing on this Jack Taylor cake, a book that I particularly recommend to fans of really dark crime fiction.

Review Copy provided by The Mysterious Press 

The Devil

Ken Bruen is one of the true masters of noir.  The man’s writing style, some kind of cross between outright poetry and weirdly formatted prose, is a nice visual representation of the genre – and private detective Jack Taylor is the perfect noir character.  It just does not get any darker than Jack Taylor.

As this eighth novel of the series begins, Jack is disappointed (but not surprised) to learn that he has been denied passage to the States because of his past run-ins with the law.  Always moody, the deeply introspective Taylor stops at the first airport bar he sees, to load up on Jameson and Guinness before heading back to Galway.  There he makes the casual acquaintance of another bar patron he will come to know as “Mr. K” – and will regret the encounter for the rest of his life.

Jack Taylor is a contradiction.  On the one hand, he can be as physically vicious with Galway’s criminal element as is required for him protect the innocent from them – even if the thugs end up floating face first in the river.  On the other, he has a soft spot for children and their mothers, so when asked to find a missing university student by the boy’s mother, Taylor feels compelled to take the case.  But when the boy’s mutilated body is discovered, and it appears that Mr. K might have something to do with the horrible death, all hell (literally) breaks lose.

Ken Bruen

When Jack Taylor begins to wonder if Mr. K might be the incarnation of Satan himself, The Devil veers wildly from the solid footing of the seven previous Jack Taylor novels.  At this point, the novel becomes not so much a piece of detective fiction, as a beautifully written supernatural thriller.  This development will probably disappoint some Ken Bruen fans at least a little, me included, but there is enough of Jack Taylor in The Devil that this is still a must read for regular readers of the series. 

Jack Taylor aficionados will always welcome another chapter of the Irish detective’s life story and “be-jaysus,” we can’t wait for the next one.

The Magdalen Martyrs

The Magdalen Martyrs is the third book in Ken Bruen’s addicting (pun intended) Jack Taylor series and for me it was the book that finally caught me up on the series to-date. I mention this only because of the way my knowledge of the future of a few of the characters in The Magdalen Martyrs might have affected my reaction to the roles they play in this book.

Jack Taylor, by many standards, is an awful man. He is no stranger to violence - an alcoholic, a user of hard drugs both recreationally (including during sex) and to escape his troubles, not a man to be taken lightly. By other standards, though, Jack is a good and an interesting man. He will not walk blindly past a father publicly abusing his child; he respects the elderly for their experience; he is loyal to the core when it comes to old friends and old haunts; he is a literate man who knows history and loves books as much as physical objects as for what is inside them. Jack is also smart enough to know that he has caused most of his own problems in life but not smart enough to change the habits that keep him in so much trouble.

When Bill Cassell, an Irish mobster to whom Jack owes a personal favor, asks him to find the woman who helped Cassell’s mother escape the old Magdalen laundry decades earlier, Jack gets busy because he knows that no one refuses Bill Cassell and lives to talk about it. The Magdalen, once a church-run home for promiscuous young women, was staffed by nuns, one of whom, in particular, took delight in physically abusing the girls as punishment for their promiscuity. A few of the girls died at this woman’s hands, so to have escaped the Magdalen for a new life on the outside was akin to a clean jailbreak.

The Magdalen Martyrs is about fighting demons and there is no one better equipped to battle demons than Jack Taylor, be they demons from the present, from his past, or even from before he was born. Taylor, while simultaneously working two separate investigations, confronts the evils of the long-gone Magdalen laundry, his own multiple addictions, his violent temper, his intense hatred of his elderly mother, and his contempt for his mother’s pet priest, the odious Father Malachy – among other demons.

As always, a Jack Taylor novel is more about the man than the cases he works – exactly what keeps fans of the series coming back for more. Despite his many flaws, Jack Taylor is an easy man to like, and I wholeheartedly recommend the entire Jack Taylor series to readers who enjoy delving into an intriguing character to the depth that a long series, such as this one has become, allows.

Readers with the stomach for dark, hardcore action simply will not want to miss Jack Taylor.

Rated at: 5.0

Once Were Cops

Being a fan of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to Bruen’s spare, but brutally harsh, prose. (Jack Taylor fans will note that Jack makes a very brief cameo appearance in this new novel, by the way.) Bruen is not a man who wastes words on the niceties of long descriptive passages about his settings or characters. Rather, his characters speak for themselves and, through them and their words, Bruen paints a more vivid description of their world, and where they fit into it, than many authors could do half as well in a 500-page novel.

Bruen has done it again in Once Were Cops, his new novel about an Irish cop who comes to New York City on an exchange program of sorts and impacts the NYPD in negative ways that no one would have believed possible beforehand. O’Shea, who blackmailed a superior into recommending him for the transfer to New York, is a psychopath of the first degree, a man thrilled to be carrying a gun and who seems to be perfectly paired with his new NYPD partner. That partner, a veteran cop by the name of Kebar, is as much a wild man in his own way as O’Shea, and the two are soon having great success on the city’s streets.

Unfortunately for both men, though, Kebar has already drawn the attention of Internal Affairs and it seems to be only a matter of time before he finds himself jailed, or at the very least, drummed out of the department. Bruen tells his story largely through the eyes and words of O’Shea, who is finding it so hard to keep his psychopathic urges under control that he has become little more than a ticking time bomb.

Bruen masterfully builds the suspense until events force Kebar to a breaking point from which he is unlikely to escape and it becomes just a question of who will survive to pick up the pieces, and whether or not O’Shea will go down with him if he crashes.

Once Were Cops is set in a surrealistic world in which extreme violence is the order of the day. It offers a dark vision of those in charge of enforcing the law on both sides of the Atlantic, often characterizing cops as little more than criminals that wear uniforms and badges. But, even though the novel seems to be set in the Gotham City of the darkest Batman movies, it works well because of the way that Bruen presents it without wasting a single word – a “black and white” style that perfectly fits the scary world he has created.

Once Were Cops is scheduled for an October 28 release.

Rated at: 4.0

Cross

If there is any such thing as Irish Noir, Ken Bruen is surely near the top of the list of its finest creators. His latest is Cross, the sixth novel in his Jack Taylor series and, though readers of the other five books in the series may find it hard to believe, this is perhaps the most dismally brutal book of the lot. Those in charge of bringing tourists to Galway, Ireland, may not be too happy with Mr. Bruen, I suppose, but Jack Taylor fans will want to get their hands on Cross as soon as they can.

Jack Taylor has never been what anyone would call a social success. He has few friends, no long term relationship, and very little real desire for either. And now that his mother is dead, not that his relationship with her was ever a very healthy one, he has no family. It says a lot about the man that the closest relationship in the world that he has is a love/hate thing that he has going with Ridge, a lesbian member of the Guard, a relationship that has gone on for a long time with neither of them ever expressing much in the way of feelings for the other. Sadly, each of them seems to feel the relationship to be more of an inherited obligation than a choice.

As Cross opens, Jack is still blaming himself for the accidental death of a little girl, something that understandably killed his long friendship with the child’s parents. To make matters worse, the young man Jack had come to love almost as a surrogate son after reluctantly taking him on as an investigative partner, is still in a coma after taking a bullet that Jack believes was actually intended for him instead. It is little wonder that most of Jack’s waking hours are spent in a constant struggle with himself to avoid falling off the wagon again. He knows that he may have already used up the last “recovery” he had in him and that if he gives into the bottle he may never be sober again.

Things are so bad, in fact, that Jack is strongly considering abandoning his beloved Galway in favor of a move to Florida of all places. But there are a few things he needs to do first. Like helping Ridge in an investigation that she hopes might finally earn her a promotion – by identifying those responsible for crucifying a young boy and leaving him for dead. And maybe, if he takes it seriously, finding out who is responsible for a rash of dog disappearances in one Galway neighborhood, or perhaps even trying to gain some closure with all those whom he has hurt and those others who haunt him even from their plots in the cemetery.

Jack Taylor is indeed a haunted man. His problem is that he knows himself well enough to understand that he has no one to blame but himself for all the failed relationships in his past. But recognizing one’s problems is the easy part; doing something about them is a bit harder.

Ken Bruen novels are about human nature as much as they are about criminals and their crimes. Bruen’s real story, one that continues from book-to-book, is about the evolution of Jack Taylor, a man who has been physically and mentally beaten up by life itself. None of us wants to be Jack Taylor but we surely cannot help but be fascinated by the man.

Readers new to the work of Ken Bruen would do well to read the Jack Taylor books in the order in which they were written because Jack’s story is a complicated one and in order to really appreciate the struggles of a man like him it is best to understand how he got to be the man he is today.

I am already looking forward to the seventh in the series but I almost wish I were just discovering the books and that I had the first six sitting in front of me ready for a marathon reading experience. They are just that good.

Rated at: 4.5

Previously Reviewed "Jack Taylor" Books:

Priest

The Dramatist

Calibre

The Guards

Priest

Little did I realize when I picked up my first Ken Bruen book, The Guards, back in the middle of April that I was going to have read three others of his by the middle of July. But that's exactly what has happened. Initially I was fascinated by the way that Bruen paid homage to many of my favorite American Noir writers of the past by using a writing style so similar to theirs and by including quotes from many of them in his books. But after reading another Jack Taylor story in Bruen's Calibre I started to wonder if too much of a good thing was going to grow a bit old. As I was soon to learn, there was no need to worry about that because Bruen lightened up on all the direct references to those writers of the forties and fifties and really hit his stride with the next Taylor novel, The Dramatist. Now, with Priest, Bruen has placed himself solidly on the watch list I keep to make sure that I don't miss any new work of certain writers.

Fans of Bruen's Jack Taylor novels will probably notice that I didn't mention The Magdalen Martyrs, an earlier book in the series. I almost always read "series fiction" in the order in which it is written but I somehow missed that one when its turn came. But it is on my shelves waiting for me now.

The beginning of Priest finds Jack Taylor confined to the mental hospital he ended up in as a result of the shocking tragedy that ended The Dramatist. Having lost all will to live, and preferring to drink himself to death, Jack still somehow managed to stay away from the booze before being locked up for his own good. Now he is being released just in time to find that his old friends have not fared well during his five months in the institution and that he barely recognizes the Ireland in which he lives. Taylor realizes that things in Galway have taken a particularly nasty turn when he hears that a priest has been beheaded inside his confessional booth.

Desperately needing something to keep his mind off of the events that placed him in the mental institution, Taylor reluctantly agrees to look into this murder at the request of Father Malachy, an old friend of his mother's. What he finds out about the dead priest's history of sexual abuse going back to the sixties, and how it was covered up, does not surprise him in the least as he tries to identify the killer. But Jack's life is never that simple. Along the way, he takes on a young, eager partner who needs a father figure as badly as Jack needs someone to take care of, a match not exactly made in heaven but one which Jack comes to accept. Their new relationship is severely tested when Jack is asked by an old friend to find and stop the stalker who is threatening her.

As is always the case in his Jack Taylor novels, Ken Bruen surrounds his basic story with the devastating portrait of what it must be like to walk in the shoes of an alcoholic who is always one drink away from losing control of his life. Jack is well aware of his problem and is forced to avoid his old friends and neighborhoods because everyone he meets seems to be heading to a pub and would be happy to have Jack join them in an exchange of rounds. His struggle to remain sober takes on an almost heroic nature and is painful to watch. Despite his self-control problems and his tendency to solve problems with the use of violence, be it verbal or physical, Jack Taylor is a hard man not to like. He loves the music of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and is a dedicated reader of relatively obscure American authors who are little appreciated even in their own country. Despite all of his troubles, his personal library somehow seems to survive and he is such a book collector that bookstore owners give him first crack at books they know he will appreciate. What's not to like about a man like that?

Readers will find that a Jack Bruen novel does not wind down in the manner of most detective or crime fiction. Bruen doesn't rely on a recap of previous events to provide him with an easy ending for his books and, in fact, some of his hardest punches to the reader's gut come just when it appears that all the story has been told. Ken Bruen has carved out a worthy spot for himself among all those authors he so admires.

Rated at: 4.0

The Dramatist

Jack Taylor is a man defined by his vices and weaknesses. Essentially, he is a man whose life has been largely consumed by an abuse of alcohol, pills, cocaine and nicotine. Taylor does nothing half way and his weaknesses have ensured that his personal life is a wreck; he runs women off at a steady pace and his closest friends are the two octogenarian women who run the failing hotel at which he's taken up permanent residence. But, hey, things are looking up for Jack. He's been off the dope and booze for a few weeks and he's even thinking about giving up cigarettes - all because his dealer has been given a six year prison sentence and Jack doesn't have the energy to locate a new supplier.

It is when Jack's dealer summons him to the prison to ask for help in finding out why and how his sister was killed that Jack reluctantly resumes his non-paying work as a private detective. The Dramatist is Ken Bruen's fourth Jack Taylor novel, and this time around, Bruen offers a more elaborate and detailed plot than in the previous three. Even so, Taylor's reluctance to get involved in the investigation of what he soon realizes was a murder and not an accidental death allows the author to detail Jack's daily struggles to remain sober and to rebuild the personal life that drugs and booze have taken from him.

This is the heart of the book and, along the way, Jack watches his mother's steady deterioration, is confronted by an old lover while struggling to maintain a new relationship, is challenged by one of his few friends to confront a group of vigilantes and is threatened by a deranged killer. Ultimately, the murder investigation is brought to a successful climax but that was not the most intriguing part of the book for me as a reader and, in fact, the killer's identity came as no great surprise. Rather, I found myself fascinated by the train wreck that is Jack Taylor's life. I rooted for him as he managed to stay off the booze after each personal crisis confronted him but I didn't really expect him to manage it. His personal history filled me with skepticism that his abstinence would last despite the fact that he continued to surprise his friends and even himself by remaining stone cold sober no matter what life tossed at him next.

But be warned: even my skepticism did not prepare me for the ending of this book. I was stunned at its suddenness and power. The Dramatist is the first Ken Bruen novel that I've read without thinking about, and admiring, the author's style more than the novel's plot. Jack Taylor fans will consider this one to be a classic.

Rated at: 4.0

The Guards

I've read dozens of hardcore crime and detective novels over the years, but Ken Bruen's The Guards stands out as one of the most unusual of the lot. I recently became aware of Ken Bruen, who lives in Galway, Ireland, and set this novel there, when I read The Triumph of the Thriller earlier this month. Bruen was listed as one of the best crime writers working in Europe today and The Guards was mentioned as a particularly good place to start reading him.

Jack Taylor, the novel's narrator, is a former member of the Garda Siochana, Ireland's police force, who has attained somewhat of a local reputation for being good at "finding things." He is the closest thing to a private detective that a highly suspicious Irish society will trust to even a small degree. Unfortunately for Taylor, one of the things that he is best at finding is his next bottle of booze and he spends a substantial portion of his waking hours in a less than sober state. Taylor's reputation as a "finder" results in a young woman asking him to investigate the supposed suicide of her daughter and what he learns in the process will forever change his life.

On the surface, Jack Taylor is little different from many of genre's most popular detectives. He is an alcoholic fighting to stay sober in a world that every day confronts him with readily available booze, a man with a history of failed relationships, one handy with sarcasm and wit even when in danger.

But two things make The Guards different from the bulk of crime fiction being written today, the first being Bruen's writing style. The novel's prose is sparse, relying on short scene after short scene to move the plot along rather than on surrounding action scenes with the details of an intricate plot. Each scene is presented through the eyes of Jack Taylor and the reader's sense of what is happening is limited to only what Taylor sees or remembers from his own past. Bruen doesn't always hold himself to standard punctuation and is very fond of producing lists in place of simple sentences. For example,

"My clothes were

Washed

Ironed

Folded

at the end of the bed."

Too, many of the scenes are preceded by one of the author's favorite quotations from the works of other crime writers such as Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley, Ed McBain and George P. Pelecanos.

The second thing that makes this novel so unusual is how unimportant the plot really turns out to be in the long run. This novel is more about character development and the relationships of the characters than it is about the investigation that Taylor undertakes on behalf of the grieving mother. And it works beautifully. Jack Taylor is an unforgettable character who takes his rightful place among the Spencers, Robicheauxs, Spades and Marlowes of the literary world.

Rated at: 4.0