Ken Bruen

"Ken Bruen has been called "hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibility" (New York Times Book Review). His prose is as characteristically sharp as his outlook in the latest Jack Taylor novel, In the Galway Silence. After much tragedy and violence, Jack Taylor has at long last landed at contentment. Of course, he still knocks back too much Jameson and dabbles in uppers, but he has a new woman in his life,...

Galway private investigator Jack Taylor confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland.

"As well-versed in politics, pop culture, and crime fiction as he is ill-fated in life, Jack Taylor is recovering from a mistaken medical diagnosis and a failed suicide attempt. In need of money, and with former cop on his resume, Jack has been hired as a night-shift security guard. But his Ukrainian boss has Jack in mind for a bit of off-the-books work. He wants Jack to find what some claim to be the first true book of heresy, The Red Book, currently...

"In the new novel Green Hell, Bruen's dark angel of a protagonist has again hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Guards, is ancient history. But Jack isn't about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at...

Stephen Blake is a good man blown in bad directions. He and girlfriend Siobhan, best friend Tommy, IRA terrorist Stapleton, and a particularly American sort of psychopath named Dade, are all on a collision course somewhere on the road between the dive bars of New York, and the pitiless desert of the Southwest. American Skin is the long-awaited American novel by Ken Bruen, the hardboiled master of Irish Noir.

These days, Jack Taylor is sober and off drugs. Mainly because his dealer's in jail. The dealer calls him for a favor to which Jack doesn't want to comply. However, the man's sister is dead and Jack investigates.

From opposite perspectives, two master authors spin a chilling tale Nick's father is a stand-up Irishman-once a cop, now a security guard in the World Trade Center's North Tower-but Nick does not take after his old man. He's "got the bad drop," meaning he only cares about booze, violence, and getting into trouble with his best friend, Todd, a low-level hood connected to the Boston mob. Todd inducts Nick into the world of petty crime. What starts as...

Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: a long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking lot attendant is rude to a series of customers, the "Manners Killer" makes sure that the next thing either sees is the beginning of his own grisly end. When he starts mailing letters to the Southeast London police squad, he'll soon find out...

Under assault by the criminal underworld, two cops strike back They call him the Alien. A petty hood with a habit of battering his enemies with a baseball bat, he earned his name for carrying out a hit while watching Ridley Scott's sci-fi classicand sticking around to finish the film afterwards. The Alien's latest target is Detective Sergeant Brant, an old-fashioned policeman whose easy brutality has won him no love on London's south side. The Alien...

America-the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: but not for PI Jack Taylor, who's just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an overly friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that, this stranger seems to know much more than he should about Jack. Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway. But, when he's called to investigate...