Green Hell

April 13, 2015
American Rhodes scholar Boru Kennedy, who narrates much of Shamus Award–winner Bruen’s sketchy 11th Jack Taylor novel (after 2013’s Purgatory), has come to Galway to write a treatise on Samuel Beckett. When muggers start kicking in Boru’s teeth, Jack comes to the rescue, and Boru’s interest shifts to the brooding former member of the Garda, the Irish national police, as a subject of study. Boru becomes Jack’s Boswell, involved in his effort to take down a Galway university professor who’s getting away with violent crimes. About half the book consists of Jack’s trademark reveries on rage and drinking, his comments on binge-watching TV crime shows, and name-dropping mystery writers. In one metafictional scene, Jack buys an unnamed Ken Bruen a drink in a bar. New readers might do better to start with the first in the series, The Guards (2001), though dedicated fans of Irish noir will spot favorite touchstones of the saga. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

May 1, 2015
Somebody really ought to write Galway ex-cop Jack Taylor's biography, but trouble erupts when a fledging American academic appoints himself the one. Brian Boru Kennedy has come to Ireland to research a dissertation on Samuel Beckett. Instead, he falls in with Jack, who, in the course of unfolding the particulars of his life, tells him about Anthony de Burgo, a media darling of a professor and novelist whose only flaw is imprisoning and beating a series of women within an inch of their lives. In the fullness of time, Aine, a returning student who's taken up with Boru, falls under de Burgo's spell, and things predictably take a turn for the worse. The first half of this tale, ostensibly Boru's draft biography of Taylor, is structured so completely as a series of mordant two-line jokes (Boru: "Will there be...ah...violence?" Jack: "We can live in hope") that the appended "miscellaneous notes, quotes, chapter headings, descriptions" aren't much more miscellaneous than the main event. In the second half, Jack takes over the narration to tell how he teamed up, more or less, with a goth girl named Emerald McKee to bring de Burgo to justice. Jack's voice sounds a lot like Boru's, and his half of the story is equally predictable, though it ends much more satisfyingly. This meeting of "a wild Irish fucked-up addict" with "a WASP wannabe alcoholic" is neither the greatest nor the least of Jack's scalding adventures, but it may be the most ritualistic of them all.

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May 1, 2015
American Boru Kennedy is in Ireland to write his dissertation on Beckett, but a trip to Galway and an encounter with Jack Taylor, the voluble, irascible, hard-drinking former Garda, prompt a change of plans. He'll forget Beckett and write a book about Taylor instead. What his research shows is exactly what Taylor has been telling readers in previous books: almost anyone who ever cared about Jack is dead or has come to loathe him (Purgatory, 2013). But fueled by Jameson, Guinness, Xanax, coke, and vitriol, Jack abides, and his current goal is to see that a preening literature professor at the University of Galway pays for his predations against female students. But nothing in Jack's life is ever straightforward or immediate, and it falls to Emerald, an elfin goth and high-functioning psychopath, to settle scores with the depraved prof. Jack's existential howls at life in modern Ireland continue, along with admiring nods to favorite authors and musicians. But here's hoping that Emerald, who is even more willful than Jack, returns. Green Hell isn't the best Taylor novel, but loyal fans of Bruen's special brand of hard-boiled angst will find it a pleasure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)