A Galway Epiphany

June 1, 2020

He's left raucous Galway behind for a quiet life in the countryside, but Jack Taylor still finds trouble when he is hit by a truck and ends up in a coma. Two children who apparently helped him are regarded as saints, but finding them is another thing, and freshly awakened Jack is up against an order of nasty nuns seeking the children for their own ends. From the multi-award-winning, two-time Edgar finalist Bruen.

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September 1, 2020
Galway private eye Jack Taylor finds himself awash in miracles, and not the good kind. The whole city is abuzz with the news of "the miracle"--the spotting of a young girl bathed in an unearthly blue light that evokes Lourdes and Fatima. Jack is the beneficiary of a miracle of his own, a close encounter with a Mack truck that spared him but brought him into close contact with the miracle girl, Sara, who was trying to rob him as he regained consciousness. Jack emerges from the hospital to a raft of cases. Renee Garvey begs him to stop the husband who beats her and has now started beating their daughter. Stephen Morgan wants him to identify the online troll who drove his daughter to suicide. And Monsignor Rael, an investigator called in from Rome, wants him to find and quiet Sara because "the Church does not wish a miracle at this time." Jack, more interested in a rash of fires set by wealthy forensic accountant Benjamin J. Cullen, asks his farmer/biker/falconer friend Keefer McDonald to help him whittle down the caseload. In shockingly fast succession, the docket is indeed diminished--not by the efforts of Jack and Keefer but by jolts of violence that claim a remarkable number of the very characters who seem to be driving the story. Eventually Jack, emerging from a lost weekend that extends to five or six days (naturally, he can't remember), grabs the reins and takes control. Or does he? Another heady Irish stew spiked with wayward epigrams, one-word paragraphs, and lots and lots of Jamesons. Sl�inte.

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September 7, 2020
At the start of Edgar finalist Bruen’s overly busy 16th Jack Taylor novel (after 2019’s Galway Girl), the former Garda and Galway PI is struck by a truck and ends up comatose in a hospital. Upon awakening weeks later, he finds Galway obsessed with miracles after the Virgin Mary seems to have appeared to a pair of refugee children on the city’s waterfront. (That Jack comes out of his coma with no mental confusion or lasting physical damage is deemed another miracle.) When the “miracle children” disappear, the resulting public clamor leads a skeptical representative of the Vatican investigating the miracle to commission Jack to find the children. Meanwhile, a number of other cases—a California con artist, a cyberbully, a homicidal serial arsonist, and more—demand his attention. Throughout it all, Jack, disillusioned and angry at the world, struggles to pull himself together after his daughter’s murder in Galway Girl, but the violent conclusion leaves him in a darker place than ever. The sheer number of individual plot threads means that none are fully developed, and their resolutions come too easily. The result is a readable but not particularly memorable entry in an otherwise strong series. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary.

October 15, 2020
The sixteenth installment of Jack Taylor's ode to Galway is another bleakly poetic, sharply insightful thriller. Taylor's rage has morphed into a dangerous sort of Zen?the optimal state, really, for such a beacon to dark souls. A miracle has blessed Galway, a mysterious blue light having been photographed hovering above a pair of refugee children honoring the Irish Famine Memorial. Despite the searches of miracle-hungry pilgrims, the children disappear until they are spotted huddling over Taylor moments after he's been hit by a Mack truck. Weeks later, Taylor awakens from a coma and learns that he's another of the pair's miracles: his accident didn't leave a scratch. Bruen wields the irony of Taylor's disgust for the church here, tossing him deep into church secrets, sought by the church's covert-ops czar to find the children and halt Galway's run of miracles. But, after the younger child and the person who takes care of them become the presumed victims of a predatory arsonist, the girl at the center of the miracles seeks Jack's protection. Too late, he discovers she's the darkest soul of them all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)