Priest

In this excellent book, Jack Taylor becomes involved in the brutal murder of a priest who has molested young boys in the past. Jack is back from a long stay in a mental hospital, following the death of the child he was watching, but he is not completely over that incident. His struggles to overcome that guilt, and his constant battle with the desire to drink, are part and parcel of this excellent story. The author scatters clues to the identity of the killer throughout the book, so that should come as no shock to the reader. Also, he intimates that there may be more tragedy in Taylor's life, and that also happens. Mr. Bruen is a consummate writer, and this series is one that holds the interest from first page to last. I know that, as of this time, there are two more books about Jack Taylor, and I can't wait to get to them!

There is no joy for Jack Taylor. This book is like a train wreck. A glorious , noir train wreck that you wouldn't look away from even if you could. The running dialog inside Jacks head is a fascinating window into the mind of a man that reads voraciously out of a desperate need to mask the pain. An excellent read for the hard boiled fan set.

Jack Taylor has recently emerged from the asylum, after his friends' daughter died while under his watch. Still clinging to Item 8234, his symbol of defiance from a wrecked career as an Irish policeman, he rejoins life in his hometown. Jack has good intentions --- he really does --- but his bad attitude keeps getting in the way. Fortunately, he doesn't always say what he thinks. Not always, just often. Too often, probably. Sometimes, though, his first thought is what he should go with. He just doesn't. If you can say nothing else about him, you have to admit that Jack is honest. Still his own worst enemy, he also has a few others pursuing him in PRIEST, although he is making strides --- slow, short strides --- toward improving his life. A few good things happen to him, although mostly in the midst of several bad things. Still a bit disoriented from his stay in the "madhouse," he barely has time to ponder his next move when Ban Garda Ridge --- with whom he has a frustrating and tenuous friendship --- mentions the dead priest, Father Joyce. Not wanting to hear the details, he nonetheless does. It is not a pretty story. "Especially in the current climate...you hear about priests now, it ain't going to be good, it's not going to be a heart-warming tale about some poor dedicated soul who spent fifty years among some remote tribe and then they ate him. No, it's going to be bad, and scandalous." Of course, it was bad and scandalous. The victim, if we can call him that, was one of the priests who amused himself with altar boys. Those altar boys did not grow up happy and well adjusted. Their lives were shattered, and what little success they achieved in the world came at great cost. Did one of them snap after all these years, or did the priest have other enemies? Jack looks into it initially because he is asked to, but eventually he finds that he can't leave it be, even when some rogue Garda types attempt to warn him off. While trying to find his way in post-loonybin Galway, an eager young lad named Cody hooks up with Jack, following Jack like a stray puppy. He says he wants to be partners and has always admired Jack, his role model. Jack indulges Cody as a gunslinger indulges a kid with a peashooter. Cody amuses, and even flatters, Jack, who surprises himself by liking the fellow. Well, things start to go pretty well for Jack, but you know that can't last. And it doesn't. How he's going to pull himself out of the depths of despair after this latest disaster is anybody's guess, but my money is on Ken Bruen to bring Jack back for yet another case. At least, I sure hope he does. The Jack Taylor novels must have a cult following by now. --- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Not that further proof was needed, but "Priest", Ken Bruen's latest apologies-be-damned journey into Hell, is additional evidence that if he is not the most talented writer of crime fiction today, he is certainly the most uninhibited. Not unlike Bruen's paradoxical hero Jack Taylor, who is as comfortable reading classic fiction in the library as he is bashing in an adversary's head with a hurley stick, Bruen's jagged, stripped down Irish prose, rendered with a chainsaw, contradicts its poetic appeal. Indeed, Ireland's classic warrior poets have been reinvented in Ken Bruen and the tragic, down-on-their-luck heroes that fill his pages. This time around, Taylor is being released from a psychiatric hospital, three years of his life lost, racked in guilt by the death of a child under his care. When a priest in Galway has been decapitated, Taylor's old nemesis, the nicotine-stained Father Malachy, swallows some pride - just barely - and enlists Taylor's help. What follows is a painfully graphic tale of pederasty in the Catholic Church, a gut-ripping expose covering tainted ground where few writers dare to tread. But despite the reprehensible central theme, life actually begins to start looking up for recovering alcoholic Taylor. Mrs. Bailey, his beloved landlady, has passed away during his incarceration, leaving to Jack an apartment and small inheritance. His always-combatant relationship with "Ridge", the lesbian cop of Ireland's Ban Guarda, shows signs of softening. And then Cody, a young investigator wannabe who's been admiring Jack from afar and drops into his life and, to Jack's initial dismay, is soon more of a son than a partner. Almost enough for long time readers to fear that loaner Jack is thinking about settling down, raising a family, and trading in his hurley for knitting needles. But soon any illusions of this unlikely honeymoon are over, and Bruen jerks the reader so abruptly back into the voids of Irish melancholy and irony that even "The Dramatist", the Bruen noir-fest that put Taylor into the loony bin in the first place, reads like a day in the amusement park. Yet through the despair and ugly twists, Bruen manages to keep the pages turning with his beautifully twisted dialogue and lyrics and his unique talent for encapsulating Ireland's melancholy in a miserly sparse allotment of words. Dark and disturbing, "Priest" has that irrespirable appeal that draws moths to flame. Don't miss it.

Ken Bruen's plots aren't why I read his Jack Taylor series. It's rather the atmosphere that Bruen has, over the Jack Taylor series, created memorably. The plot, as before, is not all that surprising, even for me. And the "Galway noir" installments are the only mysteries I read right upon their publication. At this stage, the fifth book on, many familiar elements: ex-Garda Jack struggles not to go back to the bottle. Old friends die or despise him. He has fallen away from his brief bout of seeking inspiration in his faith, and Fr Malachy, more nicotine ravaged than ever, shows up needing Jack's assistance in solving the decapitation of a pedophile priest, apparently at the hands of one of his victims, decades later. This is the main plot. Jack also seeks out forgiveness from the parents of Serena May, Cathy and Jeff, whose family's tragic story featured in the previous book, 'The Dramatist'. A secondary thread follows Jack's former colleague from the Guards, Ban Gharda Ní Iomaire, or Ridge as Jack insists on anglicizing her surname, as she is stalked. Cody, a young man who wants Jack to employ him as his fellow investigator into the stalking, predictably complicates Jack's efforts to get his life on track and deal with the sudden good fortune of choosing from three places to live in rapidly yuppified, gentrified, and stratified Galway city. He still buys his clothes, always with the price included by Bruen (!) from the charity shop Age Concern...an appropriate name for Jack as he battles with his fragile condition in his fifth decade of struggle physical and personal. This aspect provides for me the most poignant part of the book. With each chapter preceded by a mordant excerpt from Blaise Pascal's "Pensees," the existential despair Jack fights against darkens. The Church has lost its power, its priests are suspected upon their appearance in public amidst youths, and as the narrator wonders at one point as he finds a small lane near Eyre Square converted to plush townhouses, he wants to shake a Euro-rich jerk (he uses another noun) by his Armani tie. 'You know what happened to the people there?' Jack's surrounded by Irish wanting to ape British accents and American slang. Bruen captures with bitter accuracy the growing loss of an Irish cultural identity as wealth widens the gap in Galway and the organic if much poorer community that he (and his protagonist) grew up within shatters. Those in charge of Galway city care little, with nearly no exceptions in these pages, for the past of their historic and scenic city. Cranes, construction, and always more euros obliterate. Onslaughts of luxury flats within and second homes outside the city show how tenuous are the claims to tourists that this city takes pride in its cultural heritage. Investors call the shots in more ways than one. Those who knew Jack once are themselves dying off. Those who replace them may be from across the globe. In this flux, Jack roams adrift. Many celebrate the revival of