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Ken Bruen

It’s almost impossible to be thrown out of the Gardaí, but former police detective Jack Taylor has managed it.

Following the death of his father, Jack is disgraced, unemployed, and drinking himself into oblivion, when he is asked to privately investigate a teenage suicide. The incient is not the first of its kind. Multiple suicides have happened on the same bridge in Galway — and the victims have all been teenage girls.

The Irish police, the Guards, dismiss the case as coincidental, suggesting the bridge has become a destination for depressed teens. However, when Jack is approached by the mother of one of the girls, he begins to uncover things that suggest otherwise. 

The Guards, winner of the Shamus Award for Best Novel and finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel is the first title in the best selling Jack Taylor series.

Praise for Ken Bruen:

‘His voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.’ - Seattle Times

‘The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel.’ - Irish Times

‘If his prose was any sharper, your eyeballs would bleed.’ - Mystery Scene

‘Filled with a glorious love of the language and an engaging protagonist who is unlike almost any other.’ - Strand Magazine

‘One sign of a winning detective series is how much fun the author has with the creation… Ken Bruen is having a shameless good time.’ - Shelf Awareness

Lume Books

Jack Taylor Mysteries

The Guards

When Jack Taylor blew town at the end of The Guards his alcoholism was a distant memory and sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes.

A year later, Jack's back in Galway with a new leather jacket on his back, a pack of smokes in his pocket, a few grams of coke in his waistband, and a pint of Guinness on his mind. So much for new beginnings.

Before long, he's sunk into his old routine, lifting his head from the bar only every few days, appraising his surroundings for mere minutes, and then descending deep into the alcoholic, drug-induced fugue he prefers to the real world. But one day a gypsy walks into the bar during a moment of clarity and changes all that with a simple request.

Jack knows the look in this man's eyes, a look of hopelessness mixed with resolve, topped off with a quietly simmering rage. He's seen it in the mirror. Recognizing a kindred soul, Jack agrees to help him, knowing but not admitting that getting involved is going to lead to more bad than good. Because in Jack Taylor's world bad and good are part and parcel of the same lost cause. Besides, no one ever accused Jack of having good sense.

Praise for Ken Breun:

'Bruen confirms his rightful place among the finest noir stylists of his generation. This is a remarkable book from a singular talent.' – Publishers Weekly

'Bloodied and broken, Jack is still recognizable as Bruen’s boy, a wounded street poet who believes in the redemptive properties of language.' – The New York Times

'Jack Taylor is back in town, weighed down with wisecracks and cocaine … Somebody is murdering young male travellers and Taylor, with his reputation as an outsider, is the man they want to get to the root of things … Compulsive-rapid fire … entertaining.' – Sunday Tribune

The Killing of the Tinkers

Jack Taylor is walking the delicate line of sobriety. Following a particularly dangerous stint in hospital, he thinks about kicking his drinking habit once and for all, but it’s not long before he’s back to his old ways. Yet when Bill Cassell phones him to call in a favour, Jack is thrown into a case that makes his addictions the least of his worries.

Bill is what the locals call a hard man. The kind of guy you don’t cross — and you definitely don’t say no to. The job seems simple at first: track down a woman, who’s very old, if not dead. According to Bill, she helped his mother escape from the notorious Magdalene laundry — a true house of horrors where young, wayward girls were imprisoned — and he's eager to repay her.

The days quickly pass and Jack's none the wiser to the woman's whereabouts, so Bill starts piling on the pressure. Jack knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s found down a dark alley with a bullet in the head. He’s got one way to stay alive: find the woman.

But when an unnerving hunch begins to pan out, it becomes dangerously clear that the woman Jack’s looking for, and the reason Bill wants her, isn’t nearly as clear-cut as it seems.

Praise for Ken Bruen:

“A four-star delight.” — The Boston Globe

“Gloriously entertaining, Bruen’s twisted genius lies in blending noir elements with humor.” — The Miami Herald

“Dazzling. Bruen’s style is clipped, caustic, heartbreaking, and often hilarious.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Bruen is a brilliant, lyrical, deeply moving writer who can make you laugh and cry in the same paragraph. If you like Ian Rankin, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and the like, Bruen is definitely a writer to reckon with.” — The Denver Post

“Bruen is an original, grimly hilarious and gloriously Irish.” — The Washington Post 

“Bruen confirms his rightful place among the finest noir stylists of his generation.” — Publishers Weekly

“The next major new Irish voice we hear might well belong to Ken Bruen.” — Chicago Tribune 

“Bracing, eccentric, hard-boiled, unforgettable.” — New Orleans Times

The Magdalene Martyrs

Struggling detective Jack Taylor is finally sober – off the booze, pills, powder, and nearly off cigarettes too. The main reason he's been able to keep clean: his dealer's in jail. So when that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks for a favour in the soiled, sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap.

He soon discovers the dealer's sister is dead and the guards have called it "death by misadventure." The dealer is convinced that can't be true and begs Jack to see what he can find out. It's exactly what Jack does for a living, with varying levels of success. But even so, he's reluctant, maybe because of who's asking or maybe because of the bad feeling growing in his gut.

Never one to give in to bad feelings or common sense, Jack agrees to the favour, though he doesn’t begin to fathom the shocking, deadly consequences he has set in motion.

The Dramatist is the lean and lethal fourth entry in Ken Bruen's award-winning Jack Taylor series.

Praise for Ken Bruen:

'Quirky, quality fiction.' - Observer

'Outstanding … Ireland’s version of Scotland’s Ian Rankin.' – Publishers Weekly

'Ken Bruen is hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue and bleak noir sensibility — all on display in The Dramatist.' -The New York Times 

'Deserving of five stars is Ken Bruen’s The Dramatist … This is the fourth outing for the failed cop, and probably the best since The Guards.' - Time Out

The Dramatist

Jack Taylor has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends has died and the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and other substances, and his firing from the Irish national police is by now 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.

One late spring day, Jack rescues a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs with baseball bats and unexpectedly gains a new sidekick. The student, in Galway on a Rhodes scholarship, abandons his treatise on Beckett and instead devotes himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.

Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos. Emerald, an edgy young Goth, 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 colour has a decidedly lethal sheen. 

Praise for Ken Bruen:

'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.' — Seattle Times

'Ken Bruen, Ireland’s first real crime novelist . . . the Godfather of the modern Irish crime noveld . . . The acerbic wit and off-the-wall comments throughout all the books are somewhat reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.' — Irish Times

'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.' — Mystery Scene

'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.'—Shelf Awareness 

'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.' — Strand Magazine

Green Hell

From the “Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel” (Irish Independent), The Emerald Lie introduces a villain of the most unusual sort: an Eton and Cambridge graduate who becomes murderous over split infinitives, improper punctuation, and any other sign of bad grammar.

Ken Bruen’s irascible protagonist, ex-cop Jack Taylor, is meanwhile 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 murder. Jack agrees to get a read on the likely perpetrators but is soon derailed by the appearance of Emily (also known as Em, Emerald), a chameleon-like young woman who is 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.

Praise for The Emerald Lie:

“The most entertaining of Bruen’s Jack Taylor books.” — Toronto Star

“Bruen remains on the mountaintop of contemporary Irish noir. Sprightly, elliptical prose is a plus.” — Publishers Weekly

“I picture Bruen not so much writing as transcribing the words of a sweet fallen angel that are whispered feverishly into his ear.” — Bookreporter

“Nobody writes like Ken Bruen, with his ear for lilting Irish prose and his taste for the kind of gallows humor heard only at the foot of the gallows. The Emerald Lie is pure Bruen, with its verbal tics, weird typography and unorthodox wordplay.” —Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review