“Events unfold in the most mannered prose since the glory days of James Ellroy against the distant echoes of Donald Trump’s shockingly successful presidential campaign . . . Dispensing with the genre’s customary pleasures . . . Bruen still manages to deliver prose that’s both tough and elegiac.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Galway is darker than ever here, and the ghosts that haunt Jack—all the people he ever cared for—grow in number.” —Booklist
“Bruen’s visceral writing and anger (at politicians and clergy) brings a fierce, almost surreal intensity to this mad story of a missing heretical book, stolen from the Vatican, that turns up in Galway.”—Metro News (UK), “The killer thrillers: it’s been a great year for crime novels”
“Bruen’s prose has the immediacy you would expect from a noir novel. Many people are choosing non-genre fiction to help them deal with the current horrific political reality, but books like The Ghosts of Galway, and noir specifically, should really be at the top of their reading lists. Noir is uniquely capable of responding to the intersections of criminality and politics, of sucking the grime to the surface while pulling the seamy superstructure back down to earth. While Bruen doesn’t offer much hope or solutions, there is nothing fake in his unfiltered vision of our violent world.”—Lucas Spiro, Arts Fuse
Praise for Ken Bruen:
“Ken Bruen is hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibility—Bruen writes with extraordinary delicacy about a man driven to acts of violence out of wild grief and a fierce sense of guilt.” —Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review, on The Dramatist
“Bruen is an original, grimly hilarious and gloriously Irish.” —Patrick Anderson, Washington Post, on The Guards
“Bruen is a brilliant, lyrical, deeply moving writer who can make you laugh and cry in the same paragraph and whose characters are so sharply portrayed that they almost walk off the page at you. If you like Ian Rankin, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and the like, Bruen is definitely a writer to reckon with.” —Denver Post, on The Guards
“Bruen’s furious, hard-boiled prose, chopped down to its trademark essence, never fails to astonish . . . among the finest noir stylists of his generation.” —Publishers Weekly, on Calibre
“Bruen’s tommy-gun prose, lacerating dialogue, and hard-boiled worldview combine to provide entertainment of high order in dealing with low instincts.” —New York Daily News, on The Devil
“When I first read Ken’s novels, the nature of his crime really appealed to me, it seems to me to be very quintessentially Irish and he writes great characters and great plotlines . . . Jack’s a very troubled, tortured soul but I always think he’s fundamentally a moral and a good man and he’s willing to take the fight against the powerful and put himself in a line in a way that very few people would or could.” —Iain Glen
The Mysterious Press
