Review
"Selected As One Of "Six Of The Best - Independently Published Authors Tipped To Succeed" - Publishing News; "Irish writer Ken Bruen is the finest purveyor of intelligent Brit-noir." The Big Issue; "Why the hell haven't I heard of Ken Bruen before? He's a terrific writer and The Guards is one of the most mesmerizing works of crime fiction I've ever read... This guy is the real thing." James W. Hall, author of Blackwater Sound
Publishing News
Selected as one of "Six of the Best – independently published authors tipped to succeed"
The Big Issue
Irish writer Ken Bruen is the finest purveyor of intelligent Brit-noir.
James W. Hall, author of Blackwater Sound
Ken Bruen [is ] a terrific writer and The Guards is one of the most mesmerizing works of crime fiction I’ve ever read...
Publishers Weekly
Ireland's version of Scotland’s Ian Rankin.
David Honeybone, The Age (Australia)
Crime book of the year...Gripping, brutal and very funny, you can taste the futility in this Guinness noir.
Washington Post
Bruen is an original, grimly hilarious and gloriously Irish.
Kirkus Reviews
Hard-boiled, eccentric, darkly comic: Bruen bows to but doesn’t just mimic James M. Cain and the other great noirists in a breakout novel not to be missed.
Marliyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
The novel is really the journey of its hero’s dark night of the soul.
Product Description
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.
From the Publisher
NEW BOOK FROM HOTTEST NEW NAME IN CRIME FICTION
The hottest new name in crime fiction in the US is Irish author Ken Bruen, whose novel The Guards is getting rave reviews since its publication last month by the Minotaur imprint of St Martin’s Press. The Guards, set in Galway is the first of a trilogy which features the disgraced alcoholic ex-cop, Jack Taylor. The third and latest book in the series, The Magdalen Martyrs, will be published in March.
It’s not only in the US that Ken Bruen and Jack Taylor are wowing readers. In Australia publishers Duffy and Snellgrove have signed up Australian rights in all three Jack Taylor novels. International interest extends also to translation rights, with Italian rights in the trilogy sold to Frassinelli, French rights to Gallimard’s Serie Noire, and even Albanian rights have been sold. Ken Bruen is the author of nine previous novels, which were all published in London, but it is with The Guards that his international career as a writer has taken off.
About the Author
Ken Bruen, born in Galway in 1951, is the author of fourteen novels, including The Guards (2001), the highly acclaimed first Jack Taylor novel. In January he is the lead author of the Minotaur imprint in the US, where he is regarded as the hottest thriller writer since Ian Rankin.
