Former Irish cop Jack Taylor seems to have finally found a modicum of peace as he recovers from his most recent ordeal, that is, until a demented vigilante killer goes on a rampage, trying with each new murder to draw Jack into participating in a deadly game.
As well-versed in politics, pop culture, and crime fiction as he is ill-fated in life, Jack Taylor is recovering from a mistaken medical diagnosis and a failed suicide attempt. In need of money-and with former cop on his resume-Jack has been hired as a night-shift security guard. But his Ukrainian boss has Jack in mind for a bit of off-the-books work. He wants Jack to find what some claim to be the first true book of heresy, The Red Book, which is currently in the possession of a rogue priest who is hiding out in Galway after fleeing the Vatican. Despite Jack's distaste for priests of any stripe, the money is too good to turn down. When Em, the many-faced woman who has had a vise on Jack's heart and mind for the past two years, reappears and turns out to be entangled with the story of The Red Book, too, Jack is led down ever more mysterious and lethal pathways...
Reteaming a decade after their award-nominated first collaboration, Bruen and Starr complete the saga of wannabe druglord Max Fisher and his one-time assistant Angela, now working in the capital of sin and depravity: Hollywood.
"I want to kill these guys-except I can't stop laughing long enough."-Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Max and Angela are going down.
When we last saw Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos, Max was being arrested by the NYPD for drug trafficking, and Angela was fleeing the country in the wake of a brutal murder. Now both are headed for eye-opening encounters with the law-Max in the cell blocks of Attica, Angela in a quaint little prison on the Greek island of Lesbos.
"Bruen and Starr's third tag-team free-for-all seems engineered to be a pleasure of the guiltiest kind."-Booklist (starred review)
From the evil geniuses who brought you Bust comes a roller-coaster ride of suspense, mayhem, and vicious fun.
Max Fisher used to run a computer company; Angela Petrakos was his assistant and mistress. But that was last year. Now Max is reinventing himself as a hip-hop crack dealer, and Angela is back in Ireland hooking up with a would-be record setter-in the field of serial killing. Will their paths cross again?
"Hits all the noir buttons and then some...Those with a taste for it will have as much fun reading this novel as the authors obviously had writing it."-Publishers Weekly
From award-winning authors Ken Bruen and Jason Starr comes Bust, an original new noir novel by two of the world's finest crime writers.
Five valuable lessons you can learn by listening to Bust:
When you hire someone to kill your wife, don't hire a psychopath.
Don't use Drano to get rid of a dead body.
Those locks on hotel room doors? They're not very secure.
A curly blond wig isn't much of a disguise.
Secrets can kill.
Ireland's master of poetic crime fiction, called "an Irish treasure" by Shelf Awareness, spins a new alcohol-fueled Jack Taylor plot, featuring a Rhodes scholar gone astray, and professor with a violent streak, and a young woman who almost makes Jack look tame. The award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen is a as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. In the new Jack Taylor novel Green Hell, Bruen's dark angle of a protagonist has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Garda, 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 a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues preppy American student on a Rhodes Scholarship for a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick, who abandons his thesis on Beckett to write a biography of Galway's most magnetic rogue. 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.
Acclaimed Irish crime writer Ken Bruen has won numerous awards for his hard-charging, dark thrillers, which have been translated into ten languages. In Headstone, an elderly priest is nearly beaten to death and a special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises and Jack Taylor has encountered most of them, and has the scars to prove it. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland, that leave even the national police shaken. And Jack is especially vulnerable now that he has finally found love and happiness.
Jack, slowly accepting the sheer power of Headstone, comes to realize that in order to fight back he must relinquish the remaining shreds of what has made him human. Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of his life and the heart of Galway. In a moment of awful clarity, Jack realizes that not only might he be powerless to stop Headstone; he may not have the grit needed to even face it. A terrific read from a writer called "a Celtic Dashiell Hammett," Headstone is an excellent addition to the Jack Taylor series.
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 she 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 nor 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 unshakable conviction that if anyone is going to be getting away with murder on his patch, it’ll be Brant himself, thank you very much.
“Bruen’s furious hard-boiled prose, chopped down to its trademark essence, never fails to astonish.”--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
It seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober-off booze and pills, and nearly off cigarettes. One reason: his dealer's in jail. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn't-can't-because the man's sister is dead and the guards have called it "death by misadventure". But the dealer says that can't be true and begs Jack to see what he can find. Finding is what Jack does to make a living, with varying levels of success. He's reluctant, yet agrees to the favor, though he can't possibly know the deadly consequences to which this simple request will lead.
When Mitchell is released from prison after serving three years for a vicious attack he doesn't remember, he reluctantly finds himself caught up with Robert Gant, a ruthless lowlife with violent plans.
Attempting to stay out of Gant's way, Mitchell finds work as a handyman at the mansion of a faded movie actress. When she eagerly plies him with cash, cars and sex, Mitch starts to wonder if even this job comes with a catch.
But it isn't long before Mitchell's violent past catches up with him. When people close to him start getting hurt, Mitchell is forced to act, and take brutal on revenge on those who've stolen his life...
Now adapted for the big screen in the 2010 Blockbuster film starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley
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.
