Jack Taylor
11 primary works • 17 total works
Book 1
The first title in the acclaimed and bestselling crime series featuring Jack Taylor, a disgraced former police detective from Galway. Mourning the death of his father, Jack is slowly drinking himself into oblivion when he is asked to investigate a teenage suicide.
Plunged into a dangerous confrontation with a powerful businessman and with the Irish police - The Guards - who have an unhealthy interest in Jack's past, he finds that all is not as simple as it at first seemed and a dark conspiracy unfolds.
Book 2
Book 3
In the third Jack Taylor novel from acclaimed crime writer Ken Bruen, Jack has sunk to all new lows with his alcoholism. Knowing his next visit to the hospital will be his last, his days of deep depression are punctuated only by nights of tense insomnia. But when he gets a tip off about a missing girl named Rita Monroe, his ex-cop brain pulls his body into action. Rita had been one of the Magdalen girls, a group of unmarried mothers who had been consigned into slavery in a nun-run laundry. With his uncanny ability to look in all the right places, Jack sets out on Rita's trail.
Book 4
The impossible has happened: Jack Taylor is living clean and dating a mature woman. Rumour suggests he is even attending mass... The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that 'The Dramatist', a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns Jack's refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he's maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss.
The fourth Jack Taylow novel.
Book 5
Book 5
Jack Taylor has never quite been able get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom.
Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the local Garda is murdered.
After another Guard is found dead, and then another, Taylor's old colleagues from the force implore him to take on the case. The plot is one big game, and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious team: a trio of young killers with very different styles, but who are united in their common desire to take down Jack Taylor. Their ring leader is Jericho, a psychotic girl from Galway who is grieving the loss of her lover, and who will force Jack to confront some personal trauma from his past.
As sharp and sardonic as it is starkly bleak and violent, Galway Girl shows master raconteur Ken Bruen at his best: lyrical, brutal, and ceaselessly suspenseful.
Praise for Galway Girl:'A bleak, gripping slice of noir Irish life ... As good a read as you'll come across this year' IRISH INDEPENDENT
'A surreal mind and an unusual writing style ... It shouldn't work, but it does, delightfully' THE TIMES
'The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel' IRISH TIMES
Book 6
Book 6
When he awakens weeks later, he finds Ireland in a frenzy over the so-called "Miracle of Galway." People have become convinced that the two children spotted tending to him are saintly, and the site of the accident sacred. The Catholic Church isn't so sure, and Jack is commissioned to help find the children to verify the miracle or expose the stunt.
But Jack isn't the only one looking for these children. A fraudulent order of nuns needs them to legitimatize its sanctity and becomes involved with a dangerous arsonist. Soon, the building in which the children are living burns down, with one of the children and the nuns inside, and the doors bolted. Jack recognizes the arsonist's stamp and begins to suspect that the surviving girl is more sinister than miraculous. He sends her to live on the farm but is troubled over the manipulative control she soon seems to exert over Keefer. Jack's plan to intervene is derailed by traumatic memories of his deceased daughter, which send him into one of his characteristic Jameson benders. He comes to days later to find a nightmarishly gruesome scene on the farm. His quest to find the girl is now personal, and the stakes could not be higher.
Sharp and sardonic as ever, "the Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel" (Irish Independent) is at his brutal and ceaselessly suspenseful best in A Galway Epiphany.
Book 8
Book 13
Ill-fated ex-cop Jack Taylor is broke and working nightshifts as a security guard when he receives an unexpected commission - find The Red Book, an infamous blasphemous text stolen from the Vatican archives. The thief, a rogue priest, is now believed to be hiding out in Galway. Despite Jack's distaste for priests of any stripe, the money is just too good to turn down.
It won't be hard for a man with Jack's skills to track down the errant churchman, but Jack has underestimated The Red Book's toxic lure and will be powerless to stem the wave of violence unleashed in its wake - a wave that will engulf Jack and all those around him.
'Bruen has a surreal mind and an unusual writing style of short, sharp, often one-word sentences. It shouldn't work, but it does, delightfully' The Times, Books of the Year.
Book 14
After too much tragedy and violence, Jack Taylor might have at long last found contentment. Of course, he still knocks back too much Jameson and dabbles in uppers, but he has a new woman in his life, a freshly bought apartment, and little sign of trouble on the horizon, unless you count looking after his girlfriend's spoilt nine-year-old.
But once again, trouble comes to him, this time in the form of wealthy Frenchman Pierre Renaud, who wants Jack to investigate the double murder of his twin sons. Entitled, drug-addled, les enfants terribles were bound to a wheelchair, mouths glued shut and pushed off the pier.
He shouldn't, but Jack reluctantly agrees to investigate and it opens the door to the past again...
'Nobody writes like Ken Bruen, with his lilting Irish prose and his taste for the gallows humor' NEW YORK TIMES.
'As good a read as you'll come across this year' IRISH INDEPENDENT.
'A gritty, brutal tale told with its author's typical lyricism' DAILY MAIL.
'Bruen is on top form' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this organization seems like it will act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack's life. Jack's usual allies, Ridge and Stewart, are also in the line of terror. An act of appalling violence alerts them to the sleeping horror, but this realization may be too late, as Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of Jack's life and the heart of Galway. A terrific read from a writer called "a Celtic Dashiell Hammett," Headstone is an excellent addition to the Jack Taylor series (Philadelphia Inquirer).
Someone is scraping the scum off the streets of Galway, and they want Jack Taylor to get involved. A drug pusher, a rapist, a loan shark, all targeted in what look like vigilante attacks. And the killer is writing to Jack, signing their name: C-33.
Jack has had enough. He doesn’t need the money, and doesn’t want to get involved. But when his friend Stewart gets drawn in, it seems he isn’t been given a choice. In the meantime, Jack is being courted by Reardon, a charismatic billionaire intent on buying up much of Galway, and begins a tentative relationship with Reardon’s PR director, Kelly.
Caught between heaven and hell, there’s only one path for Jack Taylor to take: Purgatory.
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.
In The Emerald Lie, the latest terror to be visited upon the dark Galway streets arrives in a most unusual form: a Cambridge graduate who becomes murderous over split infinitives, dangling modifiers, and any other sign of bad grammar. Meanwhile, Jack is approached by a grieving father with a pocketful of cash on offer if Jack will help exact revenge on those responsible for his daughter's brutal rape and murder. Though hesitant to get involved, Jack agrees to get a read on the likely perpetrators. But Jack is soon derailed by the reappearance of Emily (previous alias: Emerald), the chameleon-like young woman who joined forces with Jack to take down her pedophile father in Green Hell and who remains passionate, clever, and utterly homicidal. She will use any sort of coercion to get Jack to conspire with her against the serial killer the Garda have nicknamed "the Grammarian," but her most destructive obsession just might be Jack himself.