Jack Taylor is a mess. Thrown out of The Guard, struggling against smoking and drinking, hating the gentrification of downtown Galway, his closest friend in the Guard, Ridge, has to have a breast biopsy. His one ray of hope is Cody, 13yo-ish boy who has taken a shine to him. A little girl Jack was watching over accidently falls to her death sending the father deep into the bottle and the mother dead set on revenge. From a rooftop, she takes a shot at Cody and puts him into a serious coma sending Jack further into the depths of self-loathing. Her version of an eye for an eye. It's bad enough he is 50 and walks with a limp, but now he needs a hearing aid. A guy he put away for drug dealing is released and now watches over Jack because while the guy was in prison, Jack saved his sister from something unrevealed in this book. There is a lot of back story about Jack.
A college prof wants jack to find out why dogs are being stolen near the campus and he give the 'case' to a burnout Guard, a younger version of himself, and that case goes wrong on too many fronts; more failure, typical of Taylor. Ridge tells him that a teenage boy has been crucified in a junkyard. And now speculators are offering obscene amounts of money for city center apartments that Jack sees as a stake to get him to the US. Next, the crucified boy's sister is found burned to death in her car. Cody dies and Cody's dad refuses to allow Jack to attend the funeral.
There is a saying in Ireland (and maybe everywhere else) that the law is administered in the courtroom, but justice is administered on the streets. And Jack administers justice. But others seem to be beating him to the punch or he works over the wrong person. Sometimes Lady Justice is blind and the wrong people pay for another's injustice, not all of it Jack's fault.
Jack looks in to the dead kid's family and there is a 3rd sibling, thought to be living in London. A little digging turns up that this older brother was a suspect in a hit and run killing of a mother. He checks out this lady's family and finds a daughter who is evil personified and Jack thinks he's found the killer. Now her evil and Taylor's personal demons circle each other in a deadly dance that ends, for the girl, her dad, her brother, and the accused killer of her mom, in entirely unexpected ways.
Ken Bruen explores the consequences of people's actions in a way that is hard to describe. The punishment Jack inflicts on himself drives him further and further to depths not normally seen in the books I read. But Bruen has a way of drawing the reader in. This rather short novel (280 pages) spends over 100 pages slowly bringing us into the nightmare that Taylor resides. Small events are meaningful to Jack; a chance meeting with a priest, an argument with a street mime, Cody's mom, dead of night visits to a cemetery during horizontal rain. The crucifixion doesn't become a main story line about halfway through the book. And the turns it takes, right up to the last 2 pages, are twisted enough to raise one's brow in both a quizzical and a frightening response.
Ken Bruen...this guy is good. look at his photo on the book jacket....he looks like he might have lived some of J ack's life...but it sure looks like he loves his Ireland.
East Coast Don
This is a contemporary murder mystery that takes place entirely in Galway, Ireland. The story line itself is a bit confusing at times, but Bruen writes effectively about the emotional struggles of all persons involved in the tragedies, the victims, the families, and the perpetrators. The primary character is an investigator, Jack Taylor, who is a recently recovering alcoholic. Unlike “John Barleycorn” by Jack London nearly 100 years earlier, this book is written with great knowledge of the demons of alcoholism. There is none of the excuses or denials that were redundantly addressed in London’s book. Taylor is one of those guys who repeatedly goes to bars to order his black and tans, but then sits and looks at the drinks without ever taking a swallow. He is effectively contrasted with Eoin Heaton, a still active alcoholic who eventually commits suicide. Both Taylor and Heaton have been drummed out of the local police force for their alcohol abuses, but Heaton never quit drinking. It’s my assumption that Bruen had to have been an alcoholic or he never would have been able to write so clearly about the disorder. Meanwhile, John Willis, a 19-year-old kid has not only been murdered, but he has been literally crucified, and the other members of his family are being killed, as well. Bruen is as effective a writer in this genre as any that I have read, and he remains on my “power list” of authors.
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