Magdalen Martyrs by Ken Bruen

This is another one in the Jack Taylor series, after Guards and the Killing of the Tinkers. As always, Taylor is struggling with his multiple substance problems, at times giving into mighty indulgences, but sometimes fighting off the demons that keep calling him to self-destructive behaviors. Ken Bruen writes about this material better than any other contemporary author that I’ve seen. He drops in lines like, “Alcoholics are almost always charming. They have to be, because they have to keep making new friends. They use up the old ones.” Meanwhile, he tells a story. It really is not much of a story, but it centers around a group of young women in the 1950s who get pregnant out of wedlock and then are put into the Magdalen Convent in Galway, Ireland, where they are badly mistreated, sometimes killed. The girls are the Magdalen Martyrs, the Maggies. They work in the service of the convent, doing the laundry under brutal conditions, the brutality being led by the queen of sadists, a lay person hired by the nuns to help out who the girls refer to as Lucifer. Jumping forward to the present, Taylor is given a job to find an old woman. He is hired by Bill Cassell, a Mafioso type, to find Rita Monroe, who Cassell said helped his mother escape from Magdalen. Meanwhile, there are murders being committed of a couple young men for no apparent reason. Bruen successfully ties the story lines together, but one of the magics of Bruen’s writing is that the story line is not the only thing. He presents his ideas with multiple literary references across a wide spectrum of authors, and he even uses Taylor to lecture others about the importance of some forgotten authors. He even makes a reference to a current author, one of our favorites, George Pelecanos’ book Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go: “The thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn’t case; in the end, you chase it just the same.” (And now I know East Coast Don will read this one.) This was not Bruen’s finest work, but I was entertained, and I’ve already acquired a couple more of his books to read.