The Mysterious Press
The Mysterious Press
The Mysterious Press
Ireland’s master of poetic crime fiction, called “an Irish treasure” by Shelf Awareness, spins a new alcohol-fueled Jack Taylor plot, featuring a Rhodes scholar gone astray, a professor with a violent streak, and a young woman who almost makes Jack look tame.
The award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen is as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. In the new Jack Taylor novel Green Hell, Bruen’s dark angel of a protagonist has 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 Garda, 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 the University of Galway who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues a preppy American student on a Rhodes Scholarship from a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick, who abandons his thesis on Beckett to write a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.
Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack’s vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals toward chaos. Enter Emerald, an edgy young Goth who could either be the answer to Jack’s problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing. Ireland may be known as a “green Eden,” but in Jack Taylor’s world, the national color has a decidedly lethal sheen.
“Taylor is one of the best tortured anti-heroes in crime fiction today. Men will want to be him and women will want to save him. Compelling reading.” —cayocosta72
“One sign of a winning detective series is how much fun the author has with the creation. In the 11th Jack Taylor novel, Green Hell, Ken Bruen is having a shameless good time . . . Go ahead—crack open Green Hell and have some fun.” —Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness
“For all their gloom and misery, the Taylor series is generally very pleasurable to read . . . filled with a glorious love of the language and an engaging protagonist who is unlike almost any other. It’s unclear at this point how many more go-arounds Taylor has left in him . . . but it will be a privilege to be with him for as long as he’s able.” —David J. Montgomery, Strand Magazine
“Hard-bitten but tender prose . . . Bruen is in fine form even if Jack is beaten down.” —Blogtrotter
“Taylor is a classic figure: an ex-cop turned seedy private eye . . .The book’s pleasure comes from listening to Taylor’s eloquent rants, studded with references to songs and books. His voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.” —Adam Woog, Seattle Times
“Ken Bruen doesn’t need a lot of words to tell his tales of perpetually falling Irish angel Jack Taylor—he knows the right ones. Bruen gets more done in a paragraph, a word, even a fragment of a word, than most writers get in an entire four-hundred page doorstop. If his prose was any sharper, your eyeballs would bleed.” —Kevin Burton Smith, Mystery Scene
“Ken Bruen, Ireland’s first real crime novelist . . . the Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel . . . Bruen writes in machine gun fashion, his words verbal bullets that rip through the veneer of the safe bourgeois Catholic society in which he was reared . . . The acerbic wit and off-the-wall comments throughout all the books are somewhere reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.” —Irish Times
“I’ve been impressed by the contemporary feel Ken strives to bring to his work . . . The Galway that Ken portrays is a microcosm not only of other Irish cities but of cities all over the world, as they draw on the vices as well as the graces emanating from the heart of universal culture in our time, the US.” —Johnny Duhan, Irish Independent
An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Mystery and Thriller)
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Week (7/6/2015)
An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917
