Review by Booklist Review
ack Taylor, who left town at the end of The Guards BKL D 15 02, is back in Galway. Struggling with drink, drugs, and a thrift-store wardrobe, he's still staggering from a welcome-back hangover when he's offered a job. Someone is murdering young tinkers, and the police are refusing to investigate; the head of the tinker clan wants answers. Taylor--also a bookworm and a pop-culture sponge--isn't just an antihero, he's an antidetective who spends far more time committing crimes against his liver than following leads. The supporting cast (including a character from The White Trilogy BKL F 1 03) moves the action forward while Taylor gets puking drunk, screws up his relationships, and goes days on end without getting to work. The payoff, for some readers, is Taylor's worldview. He may be a drunken shambles, but his wry humor, regret, and sense of impending mortality--often expressed in lines that are like aphorisms of the doomed--keep readers coming along. Crime solving aside, this is a strong piece of crime writing. --Keir Graff Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With his second Jack Taylor crime novel (after 2003's The Guards), Irish author Bruen confirms his rightful place among the finest noir stylists of his generation. A year after the newly sober Jack Taylor left Galway to start a new life in London, the former member of the Gardai S!och na (the Irish police) returns home, a failed marriage behind him. The PI is sinking back into alcoholic oblivion when an Irish Gypsy, Sweeper, approaches Jack for help in solving the murders of a number of young men in his clan. The Guards aren't interested, since, after all, "it's only tinkers... and everyone knows, they're always killing each other." The quintessential outsider himself, Jack empathizes with the roaming Gypsies and feels comfortable in their company. Enlisting the aid of Keegan, a burly cop friend from London, Jack sets about investigating the killings, while at the same time he struggles to keep his own personal demons under control. Bruen's spare, lean style reads like prose poetry. Indeed, beneath the surface of Jack's jaded, self-destructiveness is a romantic with a poet's sensibilities. An autodidact, Jack continually references his literary heroes, from Chester Himes to Thomas Merton. Next to his bottle of Jameson is always a book to help him through the hard times: "I needed Merton and a pint. Not necessarily in that order." This is a remarkable book from a singular talent. (Jan. 19) Forecast: A national author tour, Bruen's first in the U.S., plus blurbs from T. Jefferson Parker, James W. Hall and James Crumley, should ensure that the author builds on sales of The Guards. The book will do best in independent and specialty stories, hand-sold to readers of literate, cerebral hard-boiled fiction-and to fans of Irvine Welsh and Patrick McCabe who will appreciate the similar dark sensibility. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Back from London, where he was deeper down and farther out than Orwell ever was, comes p.i. Jack Taylor for his second walk on Galway's dark side. Jack's picked up "a leather coat and a coke habit," and not much more to show for a journey that had begun so optimistically, with fond hopes of recovering his sobriety and working out his redemption. Now, once again at anchor in his favorite pub, he's swilling Jameson's, fighting demons, making phrases (his coffee is "bitter as a rumor"), and being available to troubled souls in need of his services. Enter the tinker Sweeper. Someone's been murdering and mutilating his gypsy clansmen, and he's heard Jack will help when the Garda Siochana can't be bothered. Reluctantly, Jack moves into action, or at least into another of his wobbly journeys with idiosyncratic detours, this time for a brief but poignant love affair, a bizarre skirmish with a teenaged swan-killer, and related twistings and turnings. When at length he gets his man, it's the wrong man. Rectifying this spot of error thrusts Jack into a contract with--well, not quite the Devil, but a near relation. From time to time, Jack (The Guards, 2003) may test a reader's tolerance for the comic antihero, but how can you resist a man who says, "Lord knows, feeling bad is the skin I've worn almost all my life"? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
