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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
..it leaps off every page ! ......, 30 May 2002
The Killing of the Tinkers is two hundred and fifty-three pages of the best dialogue I have ever read. Believable, in-your-face, and real; you are there, sitting across the table, eavesdropping at the next bar stool. It leaps off every page and makes you part of Jack Taylor's world. The reviews of Ken's work tend to focus on the dark side. But that's not all that captured me. I was grabbed from the first sentence of the first page by the self-destructive soul of Jack Taylor; a soul that could only be cauterized by alcohol and cocaine. Yes, that's dark. But it's too narrow an assessment. If you have a dark side ( and how many of us have, if we're honest) you will find a memory or two in the lost evenings and anguished mornings of Jack Taylor. But where there is dark, there must also be light. And that light is there, perhaps dim at times, but it's there. It's there in the women who love him, in the people who still trust him, in the friends who care for him, in himself too: his ability to pick himself up again, his sense of justice, his attempts to find and punish the evil ones. There's the humour too, always there, black humour maybe, but it's the fabric that saves Jack Taylor and the people who populate Ken Bruen's Galway from absolute despair. Yes, Jack Taylor finds his anaesthetic in cocaine and alcohol. But he also finds it in books. It seems at times that he could just as easily be tempted into Charlie Byrne's as into his local pub. If you love to read (and I suspect you wouldn't be reading this unless you do) you'll be able to 'stack' Jack Taylor's selections on your own book shelves as you get lost in this dark trek through the netherworld of Galway. But you also get to travel the streets and meet the people of the real Galway, from Forster Street to Hidden Valley, from Vinny in Charlie Byrnes to Declan in Zhivago's. Maybe Ken Bruen is doing for Galway in The Killing of the Tinkers what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses: giving us a map of a Galway that is rapidly disappearing under the paws of the Celtic Tiger. That's it. Buy the book, tell your friends, buy some more................ And next time you see me absorbed, intoxicated, in the shelves of your favourite bookstore in Galway, you know I'll be sampling the sources of my drugs. ....Jack Higgins, James Patterson, Jeffery Deaver, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly and Ken Bruen..... ......... Pat Mullan
May, 2002.
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by Ken Bruen
by Ken Bruen
by Ken Bruen
by Ken Bruen
by Ken Bruen
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