Edge, a shadow organization made up of the most powerful figures in Galway society, exists to rid the city of criminals and abusers who have evaded the law. Long wary of the organization, the Vatican is not pleased when rumors start swirling that one of the Catholic Church's own priests has joined its ranks. And who better to ask to intercede than the whiskey-swigging ex-cop who always seems to have one foot in the pub and another among Ireland's clergy?

Lately, Jack has been spending his days sitting at the bedside of a man he put into a coma and taking care of a little dog named Trip, bequeathed to him by a dead nun. Then an envoy to the Archdiocese shows up at his door, asking Jack to go speak to a priest named Kevin Whelan and dissuade him from any involvement with Edge. Jack accepts the mission, but the next day Father Whelan is found dead, hanging from a rope in his own backyard.

Would Edge really kill one of their own? And if not, who else would be bold enough to take on the most powerful organization in the city? As more Edge members are murdered, the Vatican grows alarmed that someone even worse will take their place. It's up to Jack Taylor to nail the culprit before Edge is dissolved completely and Galway is thrown into chaos.

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma to discover that much of the world has changed since he last walked the streets of Galway. The pandemic had hit while he was under, devastating the lives of many in his beloved city and beyond. Now, as Jack tries to recover from the attack that put him in the hospital and absorb the incredible changes in the world around him, a woman approaches him with a distressing case: two local nuns have been bludgeoned by a mysterious man wielding a hammer, and more are sure to follow. As the police fail to act while the violence against the Sisters escalates, Jack seems like their only hope.

Initially wary of becoming involved in the investigation, Jack finds he cannot stay away from the mystery surrounding these vicious attacks. He also cannot shake a feeling of darkness that has haunted him since he awoke from his coma--a darkness that is far too close for comfort. Luckily an old friend is there to help see him through and there is always Jack's dark wit and a drink to help shore up his mood.

An Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.

Praised by authors and critics around the globe, The Guards is the first novel in the Jack Taylor series and heralded the arrival of prominent Irish writer Ken Bruen as an essential voice in contemporary crime fiction.

Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana--The Guards, Ireland's police force--and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. In his sober moments Jack aspires to become Ireland's best private investigator, not to mention its first--Irish history, full of betrayal and espionage, discourages any profession so closely related to informing. But in truth Jack is teetering on the brink of his life's sharpest edges, his memories of the past cutting deep into his soul and his prospects for the future nonexistent.

Nonexistent, that is, until a dazzling woman walks into the bar with a strange request and a rumor about Jack's talent for finding things. Odds are he won't be able to climb off his barstool long enough to get involved with his radiant new client, but when he surprises himself by getting hired, Jack has little idea of what he's getting into.

Stark, violent, sharp, and funny, The Guards is an exceptional novel, one that leaves you stunned and breathless, flipping back to the beginning in a mad dash to find Jack Taylor and enter his world all over again. It's an unforgettable story that's gritty, absorbing, and saturated with the rough-edged rhythms of the Galway streets.

Winner of the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel

Ken Bruen wowed critics and readers alike when he introduced Jack Taylor in The Guards; now he's back with The Killing of the Tinkers, a novel of gritty brilliance that cements Bruen's place among the greats of modern crime fiction.

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. In the opening pages of The Killing of the Tinkers, Jack's back in Galway a year later 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 patterns, 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 a big gypsy walks into the bar one day during a moment of Jack's 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. But in Jack Taylor's world bad and good are part and parcel of the same lost cause, and besides, no one ever accused Jack of having good sense.

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma to discover that much of the world has changed since he last walked the streets of Galway. The pandemic had hit while he was under, devastating the lives of many in his beloved city and beyond. Now, as Jack tries to recover from the attack that put him in the hospital and absorb the incredible changes in the world around him, a woman approaches him with a distressing case: two local nuns have been bludgeoned by a mysterious man wielding a hammer, and more are sure to follow. As the police fail to act while the violence against the Sisters escalates, Jack seems like their only hope.

Initially wary of becoming involved in the investigation, Jack finds he cannot stay away from the mystery surrounding these vicious attacks. He also cannot shake a feeling of darkness that has haunted him since he awoke from his coma--a darkness that is far too close for comfort. Luckily an old friend is there to help see him through and there is always Jack's dark wit and a drink to help shore up his mood.

The Magdalen Martyrs, the third Galway-set novel by Edgar, Barry, and Macavity finalist and Shamus Award-winner Ken Bruen, is a gripping, dazzling story that takes the Jack Taylor series to explosive new heights of suspense.

Jack Taylor is walking the delicate edge of a sobriety he doesn't trust when his phone rings. He's in debt to a Galway tough named Bill Cassell, what the locals call a hard man. Bill did Jack a big favor a while back; the trouble is, he never lets a favor go unreturned.

Jack is amazed when Cassell simply asks him to track down a woman, now either dead or very old, who long ago helped his mother escape from the notorious Magdalen laundry, where young wayward girls were imprisoned and abused. Jack doesn't like the odds of finding the woman, but counts himself lucky that the task is at least on the right side of the law.

Until he spends a few days spinning his wheels and is dragged in front of Cassell for a quick reminder of his priorities. Bill's goons do a little spinning of their own, playing a game of Russian roulette a little too close to the back of Jack's head. It's only blind luck and the mercy of a god he no longer trusts that land Jack back on the street rather than face down in a cellar with a bullet in his skull. He's got one chance to stay alive: find this woman.

Unfortunately, he can't escape his own curiosity, and an unnerving hunch quickly turns into a solid fact: just who Jack's looking for, and why, aren't nearly what they seem.

A shadowy killer is stalking Galway in The Dramatist, the fourth lean and lethal entry in the critically-acclaimed, award-winning Jack Taylor series from author Ken Bruen.

Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober--off booze, pills, powder, and nearly off cigarettes, too. The main reason he's been able to keep clean: his dealer's in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the soiled, sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn't, can't, because the dealer's sister is dead, and the guards have called it death by misadventure.

The dealer knows that can't be true and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find out. It's exactly what Jack does, with varying levels of success, to make a living. But 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 favor, though he can't possibly know the shocking, deadly consequences he has set in motion. But he and everyone he holds dear will find out soon, sooner than anyone knows.

In the newest novel in Bruen's thrilling series, ex-cop turned private eye Jack Taylor is pulled out of his quiet new life on a farm by three mysteries that soon prove dangerously linked

Jack Taylor has finally escaped the despair of his violent life in Galway in favor of a quiet retirement in the country with his friend Keefer, a former Rolling Stones roadie, and a falcon named Maeve. But on a day trip back into the city to sort out his affairs, Jack is hit by a truck in front of Galway's Famine Memorial, left in a coma but mysteriously without a scratch on him.

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. Jack returns to his old tricks, and his old demons, as his quest becomes personal.

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.

The brutal murder of a local priest sets in motion the fifth explosive Jack Taylor novel from Edgar, Anthony, Shamus, Barry, and Macavity winner and finalist Ken Bruen.

Ireland, awash with cash and greed, no longer turns to the Church for solace or comfort. But the decapitation of Father Joyce in a Galway confessional horrifies even the most jaded citizen.

Jack Taylor, devastated by the recent trauma of personal loss, has always believed himself to be beyond salvation. But a new job offers a fresh start, and an unexpected partnership provides hope that his one desperate vision--of family--might yet be fulfilled.

An eerie mix of exorcism, a predatory stalker, and unlikely attraction conspires to lure him into a murderous web of dark conspiracies. The specter of a child haunts every waking moment.

Explosive, unsettling and totally original, Ken Bruen's writing captures the brooding landscape of Irish society at a time of social and economic upheaval. Priest is evidence of an unmistakable literary talent.

In the next book in Ken Bruen's legendary private investigator series, Jack Taylor faces his most challenging opponent yet in this noir masterpiece, The Devil.

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 a student murder--connected to an elusive Mr. K--he remembers the man from the airport. Is the stranger really who he says he is? Jack struggles to make sense of it all, and the Jameson isn't helping. After several more murders and too many coincidental encounters, Jack believes he may have met his nemesis. But why has he been chosen? And could he really have taken on the devil himself?

Suspenseful, haunting, and totally unique, The Devil is Bruen at his very best.

In Cross, the sixth installment of Ken Bruen's award-winning series, Jack Taylor investigates a gruesome crucifixion in Galway, but first he must face his own demons.

Jack Taylor brings death and pain to everyone he loves. His only hope of redemption - his surrogate son, Cody - is lying in the hospital in a coma. At least he still has Ridge, his old friend from the Guards, though theirs is an unorthodox relationship. When she tells him that a boy has been crucified in Galway city, he agrees to help her search for the killer.

Jack's investigations take him to many of his old haunts where he encounters ghosts, both dead and living. Everyone wants something from him, but Jack is not sure he has anything left to give. Maybe he should disappear--pocket his money and get the hell out of Galway like everyone else seems to be doing. But when the sister of the murdered boy is burned to death, Jack decides he must hunt down the killer, if only to administer his own brand of justice. Ken Bruen's Cross is a suspenseful and deeply moving mystery.

The award-winning crime novelist Ken Bruen is as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. In Green Hell, Bruen's dark angel of a protagonist, Jack Taylor, has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead and the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up on sobriety; and his firing from the Irish national police 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 developed a savage habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. Jack unexpectedly gains a new sidekick after rescuing a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs. The student, a Rhodes scholar, decides to devote himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway's most magnetic rogue. Between pub crawls and street fights, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos, putting both the student and himself in danger. 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 lethal sheen.

From the Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel (Irish Independent), The Emerald Lie introduces a villain of the most unusual type: 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 rape and 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 by turns passionate, clever, and utterly homicidal. She is ready to 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.

Hip, violent and funny vignettes of the mean streets of southeast London tie together this rowdy set of short novels from the Irish crime writer (Publishers Weekly).

At sixty-two, Chief Inspector Roberts is nearly too old to be a cop, but he makes up for his age with a ferocity that the younger detectives cannot match. After four decades on the force, he has a daughter who hates him, a wife who cheats, and a bank account that grows emptier every year. But on London's darker streets, Roberts is a force to be reckoned with. With his partner, the gleefully brutal Detective Sergeant Brant, Roberts looks for every policeman's dream: the White Arrest, a high-profile success that makes up for all their past failures. In A White Arrest, their target is a bat-wielding lunatic who knocks off drug dealers. In Taming the Alien, they hunt a mysterious hit man who earned his nickname by carrying out a hit while watching Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic. And in The McDead, Roberts and Brant set their sights on a cunning kingpin ruling London's southeast side. Gripping and gritty, Ken Bruen's White Trilogy is an unforgettable noir portrait of London's seedy underworld.

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, a freshly bought apartment, and little sign of trouble on the horizon. Once again, trouble comes to him, this time in the form of a wealthy Frenchman who wants Jack to investigate the double-murder of his twin sons. Jack is meanwhile roped into looking after his girlfriend's nine-year-old son, and is in for a shock with the appearance of a character out of his past. The plot is one big chess game and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious player: a vigilante called Silence, because he's the last thing his victims will ever hear.

This is Ken Bruen at his most darkly humorous, his most lovably bleak, as he shows us the meaning behind a proverb of his own design--the Irish can abide almost anything save silence.

The stories paint a picture of Dublin as the Celtic Tiger, a beast crouched on its hind legs about to leap at you and roaring with its intensity . . . The cynicism and despair of classic noir is portrayed within each of these stories. --Metro LA

Dublin Noir is perhaps the best short story anthology I've read. --Reviewing the Evidence

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: Ken Bruen, Eoin Colfer, Jason Starr, Laura Lippman, Olen Steinhauer, Peter Spiegelman, Kevin Wignall, Jim Fusilli, John Rickards, Patrick J. Lambe, Charlie Stella, Ray Banks, James O. Born, Sarah Weinman, Pat Mullan, Reed Farrel Coleman, and others.

From the introduction by Ken Bruen:

Tourists booking holidays in Ireland inevitably do Dublin first and seem to always end up in Temple Bar, our very own Times Square--replete with the squalor, the drugs, the homeless, and the wandering psychos . . . Pat Boran, the legendary director of the Dublin Arts Festival, once invited me to do a reading in Temple Bar. During my gig, a woman up and died . . . Temple Bar, naturally, features in many of the stories, and the authors certainly capture the noir element.

Here, the city's not exactly seen through rose-tinted glasses. Black Irish humor shines in all the stories, as if instinctively the writers knew: You want it Dublin, then you want it funny as sin, dark as the smile on Joyce's face when he found he was on the index of banned books. To be Irish is to dance on the Titanic; laughter is indeed the best revenge, it's our way of evening the score. You won't find many leprechauns or bodhrans here--and not one top o' the mornin'. The Quiet Man has gone dark, and with a vengeance. If nothing else, this collection will kill stone-dead the Irish caricature of shite talk and blarney. In the days of Brit occupation, to be outside Dublin was to be outside the pale. This collection is so far from that parameter, you can't even see the boundary.

Blitz represents Ken Bruen at his edgy, lethal, and sharp-tongued best, and will reward fans of his Jack Taylor novels with another astonishing, smart, and brutal vision from a writer rapidly becoming one of the best of his generation.

The basis for the major motion picture starring Jason Statham, Paddy Considine, and Aidan Gillen.

The South East London police squad are down and out: Detective Sergeant Brant is in hot water for assaulting a police shrink, Chief Inspector Roberts' wife has died in a horrific car accident, and WPC Falls is still figuring out how to navigate her job as a black female investigator in the notorious unit. When a serial killer takes his show on the road, things get worse for all three. Nicknamed The Blitz by the rabid London media, the killer is aiming for tabloid immortality by killing cops in different beats around the city.

Inspector Brant is back is back in Ammunition, the seventh novel in Ken Bruen's London-based cop series.

Over the many years that Inspector Brant has been bringing his own patented brand of policing to the streets of southeast London, the brilliant but tough cop has made a few enemies. So when a crazed gunman, hired by persons unknown, pumps a magazine full of bullets into Brant in a local pub, leaving him in grasping at life (but ornery as ever), his colleagues on the squad are left wondering how to react.

Brant's old partner Inspector Roberts, the man who may know him best, finds himself wondering why someone didn't shoot the hateful detective years ago. In Ken Bruen's Ammunition, they're all about to find out that the answer is quite simple: if you come after Brant you'd damn well better kill him the first time--because if you don't, you won't want to stick around to find out what happens next.

Ken Bruen's Once Were Cops melds the street poetry of Brooklyn and Dublin into a fast-paced, incomparable hard-boiled novel.

Michael O'Shea is a member of Ireland's police force, known as The Guards. He's also a sociopath who walks a knife edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from the States go to Ireland, Shay, as he's known, has his lifelong dream come true--he becomes a member of the NYPD. But Shay's dream is about to become New York's nightmare.

Paired with an unstable cop nicknamed Kebar for his liberal use of a short, lethal metal stick called a K-bar, the two unlikely partners become a devastatingly effective force in the war against crime.

But Kebar harbors a dangerous secret: he's sold out to the mob to help his sister. Her rape and beating leaves her in a coma and pushes an already unstable Kebar over the edge just as Shea's dark secrets threaten boil over and into the streets of New York.

Inspector Brant is on the trail of a serial killer obsessed with sending Londoners an important message in this lightning-paced, hard-boiled noir from Ken Bruen, Calibre.

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 just how bad a man's manners can get. The Southeast is dominated by the perpetual sneer of one Inspector Brant, and while he might or might not agree with the killer's cause and can even forgive his tactics to some degree, Brant is just ornery enough to employ his trademark brand of amoral, borderline-criminal policing to the hunt for the Manners Killer. For if there's one thing that drives the incomparable inspector, it's the unshakeable conviction that if anyone is going to be getting away with murder on his patch, it'll be Brant himself, thank you very much.