The Guards by Ken Bruen

The last Bruen book I read was Once Were Cops that was a downright creepy tale of a deranged Irish cop stationed in NYC. Scared the crap right out of me. When I was in the library, I wandered over to the "B" rack to see what was on the shelf. I found 4-5 novels each with the heading "by the award winning author of The Guard." Well, The Guard was on the shelf so I figured why not start with the prize winner?

Jack Taylor is a 50-ish ex-guard, now sort of a private investigator in Galway. He is the son of a decent man who introduced Jack to literature, so a book or a quote is not far from his consciousness. He now walks a narrow ledge that only drunks can understand and navigate. He spends his days at a pub with it's 90ish year old publican as his closest (only?) friend. In Galway, a series of teenage girls have committed suicide. One of the mothers hates that her daughter is tagged as a suicide and asks Jack to look into it. He joins up with a sometime friend and painter who is entirely amoral. They probe around and find a couple of pedophiles preying on young girls who work at this one firm. The story wanders back and forth between Jack's personal battle with the bottle, the girl's mother, his landlord, and other colorful (and mostly old) characters, like the sentries, in Galway. Between rehab, sobriety, binges, deaths (murders?), we are genuinely happy to see Jack stay sober and sad when he dives back into his own personal hell in the bottom of the bottle. Jack is basically a good guy with a sense of morality and a decaying liver. His problem is he and his painter friend seem to get mixed up in death not always of their doing, but mostly deserved and most certainly outside the rule of law. Small, but significant plot shifts sometimes come out of nowhere with occasional audible gasps, at least out of me. Bruen is all about dialogue, not extensive narrative setting up a scene. And the dialogue is great. I put the dialogue of Bruen right up there with Pelacanos, Price, Connelly, Palahniuk. Well worth a further look to see how Jack Taylor battles the bottle and demons as his life spirals barely in control.

BTW, according to the website (www.kenbruen.com), one of his books (London Blvd) is due for the movies, written for the screen by the guy who did The Departed (William Monahan). Colin Farrell and Keira Knightly are featured. Dark, talky and violent would by my guess.

east coast don