Galway Confidential by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2024

Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma after 18 months and, within minutes, has his first taste of Jameson. It makes him feel much better.

Jack entered the coma after being stabbed multiple times at the end of A Galway Epiphany. Upon awakening, Jack learns that his life was saved by a man named Rafferty. Rafferty has been visiting Jack after convincing the hospital nurses that he is Jack’s brother. Rafferty has taken an interest in Jack’s life — he explains that he produces a true crime podcast that often features Jack’s cases — and, after Jack's discharge, Rafferty tries to partner with him on a couple of investigations. This will prove to be bad both for Jack and Rafferty, although series fans know that having any sort of friendship with Jack is likely to invite danger.

The plot of Galway Confidential is fairly typical for a Jack Taylor novel, although it might be less shockingly violent than most. A former nun, Shiela Winston, wants to hire Jack to find the rogue who has been killing nuns in Galway. The Guards are doing little to solve the crime spree, as they are overwhelmed with protestors against lockdowns and vaccination policies.

In addition to investigating attacks on nuns, Jack searches out a couple of affluent youngsters who are setting fire to the homeless. Jack also meets up with Quinlan, an associate of Rafferty whose violent approach to problem solving is not as compatible with Jack’s as Quinlan believes.

During his investigations, Jack is contacted by an alcoholic priest. Jack forces the priest to dry out — perhaps an act of hypocrisy for someone who drinks as much as Jack — but again, any association with Jack isn’t likely to end well. The plot threads weave together in ways that readers have come to expect from Ken Bruen.

Bruen has a history of referencing books, television shows, and movies in the Jack Taylor novels. A character in Green Hell explains that the references ground the novels in “stuff” that the reader knows. Bruen makes fewer cultural references than usual in Galway Confidential (perhaps because Taylor has been in a coma and thus unable to consume culture), but he grounds the novel in current events, as well as events Jack missed while he was sleeping: the Brexit disaster, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the Queen’s death, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the influx of refugees into Ireland, inflation and other consequences of the pandemic. The implication is that Jack has good reason to drink.

Jack Taylor novels are quick reads. Bruen’s minimalist writing style tells the story in short paragraphs that surround dramatic moments with quirkiness. Bruen’s notion of a long sentence is: “He had the kind of face that you know has never really been walloped properly but I could amend that.” Dialog is crisp, in part because Taylor rarely speaks unless he can’t prevent himself from responding to idiocy with sarcasm. Galway Confidential is an unremarkable entry in a remarkable series but since every Jack Taylor novel is darkly entertaining, my recommendation is nearly automatic.

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The Galway Epiphany by Ken Bruen

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on November 3, 2020

A priest has an incurable disease that will ravish him before it leaves him dead. He wants to speed the process but it’s bad form for a priest to commit suicide. The priest asks Jack Taylor to kill him. When Taylor argues that murder is a mortal sin, the priest responds, “You have so many sins, will God notice?”

Taylor weighs the decision to kill the priest after a different priest confesses that he intends to kill a satanic child who, for a time, befriended Taylor. Such is Jack Taylor’s life. Those are only two of the plot threads that weave together in A Galway Epiphany.

Children are at the heart of the novel, both as abuse victims and as abusers. One of the villains in the story is burning down buildings, including one that might be occupied by kids. Another villain is a man who beats his six-year-old daughter. Another is a child whose bullying caused another child’s suicide. The remaining villain — the murderous child — is creating fake miracles that the gullible are only too happy to believe.

Taylor makes clear his disgust with a religion that fails to protect children from its priests. Still, he decides to go on something like a religious retreat where he will try to recharge while avoiding contact with nuns and priests. To the nun in charge, avoiding contact seems like a fine idea.

Taylor’s relationship with Catholicism is both strained and ambiguous. He is inclined to believe that all miracles are fake until he experiences one of his own. He’s hit by a car, wakes up from a coma with no serious injuries, and actually feels better than he has in years — until the novel’s end. Rarely does a Jack Taylor novel end well for Taylor. This one is no exception. Taylor might actually be on the verge of an epiphany until the last page. Like many of Ken Bruen’s last pages, it changes the narrative entirely.

Along the way, Taylor makes jaded and pithy comments about politics and praises a variety of crime writers, some of whom I’ve read and some I haven’t. Reading a Jack Taylor novel always makes my reading list grow.

I could complain that Taylor novels are formulaic but I like the formula. The books always move in sprints, occasionally pausing for Taylor to drink and exchange cross words with, well, everyone who speaks to him. Taylor’s dark struggles with whiskey and evil make him philosophical without being pedantic. He is one of the most troubled characters in crime fiction and, for that reason, among the most interesting. The Galway Epiphany is about average for a Jack Taylor novel, making my recommendation virtually automatic.

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Galway Girl by Ken Bruen

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on November 5, 2019

Ken Bruen always packs a lot of story into his novels, while using a bare minimum of well-chosen and artfully arranged words surrounded by quite a bit of white space. Some of those words nod at current political realities or popular culture, including music and crime novels, while others illuminate the complexity of Galway, where snooty fern bars compete with grimy pubs that leave hardcore drinkers like Jack Taylor largely undisturbed. (Speaking of pop culture, two songs called “Galway Girl,” one by Ed Sheeran and one by Steve Earle, have been hits in Ireland. Bruen tips his hat to both songs during the course of the novel.)

Jack is mourning his latest tragedy (no spoiler here, but read In the Galway Silence to find the most recent explanation for Taylor’s heavy drinking) while a fellow named Scott, son of a recently deceased Guard (an Irish cop), is commencing a killing spree that targets Guards. Jack, a former Guard turned private investigator, witnesses one of the killings.

The same killing is filmed by a person who calls herself Jericho. Recent novels featured a woman named Emerald who tormented Jack; Jericho is her replacement. Jack, as he laments, seems to be a magnet for “crazies, lunatics, dispossessed, neurotics.” Most of them are homicidal.

A subplot involves a woman who wants to hire Jack because the mayor’s eleven-year-old son drowned her ten-year-old daughter. The woman thinks Jack might make Jimmy confess. What she means is, Jack might get revenge on her behalf, but even Jack won’t murder a child. The woman turns out to be more Machiavellian than Jack suspects.

Another subplot involves the sudden appearance of the son of Jack’s former best friend — a bestie until Jack killed him. With good reason, Jack is running low on friends. His dead friend’s son wants to even the score, but he’ll need to stand in line. That storyline is likely to stretch into future novels, as will Jack’s relationship with a falconer — a relationship that will only last until Bruen decides to kill him off.

One of Jack’s friends (but only when he wants something from Jack) is a priest. The priest wants Jack to get rid of his sister’s lesbian lover because a relative’s lesbian relationship isn’t good for the priest’s image. That storyline ties into another. In fact, the storylines generally weave together, suggesting that each bit of evil in Galway is part of a larger whole. Another of his friends is a nun, perhaps the only character in the series who sees something besides darkness in Jack’s heart. She features prominently in the plot before the novel ends.

I always enjoy and recommend Bruen’s novels, and this one is no exception. The story has less power, however, than some other Taylor novels, if only because of its familiarity. Crazy female killers is a theme that should have been put to rest with Emerald. Reprising it with Jericho has a “same old” feeling while making me wonder just how many crazy female killers Galway can support. Still, for Ken Bruen fans, even a lesser Jack Taylor novel is better than living through another year with no new Jack Taylor novel at all.

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In the Galway Silence by Ken Bruen

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on November 13, 2018

Here’s how one of the characters in Ken Bruen’s In the Galway Silence describes Jack Taylor: “Not fully nuts but circling.” The description is apt, but the misfortunes that befall Taylor would make anyone nuts.

Two young and obnoxious men are killed by a man who superglues their mouths shut and pins a sign on their bodies that says “Silence.” Their father wants to hire Jack to bring him the killer. Jack, who seems to have entered into a steady relationship and is happy for the first time in a long time, wants no ugliness to disturb his new state of mind. Being Jack, he nevertheless commences an investigation. More “Silence” killings ensue, the apparent work of a vigilante.

As Jack investigates, he saves a man who jumped into the sea, an act of kindness that he might come to regret. A child molester, a dog killer, an annoying documentary maker, and a black swan all contribute to the plot.

In his personal life, Jack finds himself stuck with childcare duties, the downside of dating a woman who has a child. As series fans will understand, Jack is probably the least qualified person in the universe to provide childcare, with the exception of the various pedophiles the story touches upon. In Jack’s words, concerning the boy he is watching: “I’d have sold his miserable hide for one shot of Jameson.” Series readers might also remember an unfortunate mishap some books ago involving a baby and a window. There’s a reason Jack has little success in relationships.

But he misses his dog, so it is clear that a good heart beats in Jack’s chest. This novel proves Jack’s fundamental decency in multiple ways, not the least in a scene that leaves him briefly thankful for a respite from the bitterness that engulfs him.

As usual, Jack glides through the novel, taking frequent drinks, suppressing or (more often) making snarky comments to people who haven’t learned to leave him alone, and reviewing his growing list of mistakes. He also learns from an ex-wife that his past holds a surprise. But series readers know that anything good in Jack’s life will soon be destroyed and the descending darkness will again seem unbearable. There is no protagonist in fiction more tragic than Jack Taylor.

Jack provides the running commentary on current events, television shows, pop music, and crime novels for which Bruen is famed. I always find something new to read or watch in a Bruen novel, because Bruen understands that good writing isn’t the exclusive province of Booker prize winners. Bruen also incorporates a chess theme into the plot, strategies of the game informing Jack’s investigation in the same blurry way that Jack approaches life. But what Bruen does best is the punch-in-the-gut moment that makes Jack Taylor novels special. In the Galway Silence delivers a stronger punch than most, making it one of the best in the series.

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The Ghosts of Galway by Ken Bruen

Published by Mysterious Press on November 14, 2017

The Ghosts of Galway has several meanings in Ken Bruen’s novel of the same name, including Jack Taylor’s many departed friends, the Galwegians whose death he has caused or for which he blames himself, and a social protest movement that identifies itself by that name. The story’s local color includes the hated water tax and some dead swans, but Jack’s running commentary touches upon American politics, as well. He’s more interested, however, in American television, although politics is just another form of televised entertainment.

Jack is more concerned about his old demons than any new ghosts, but life never lets him take the back seat he so fervently hopes to occupy. Worried about his mortality after receiving an ambiguous diagnosis, Jack would like to patch up some friendships, but his old friends are having none of it. That leaves him with Emily, who in recent novels has been a dangerous friend. She’s even more dangerous in this one.

Jack is recruited to obtain The Red Book, purportedly written as a counterargument to The Book of Kells in about 800 A.D., if it exists at all. Jack loves to read but he doesn’t want his life to be the plot of a Dan Brown novel, so he decides to pass on the job until the paycheck convinces him otherwise.

The job should be easy since the book is for sale in Galway, having been pilfered from the Vatican library by a rogue priest. Of course, nothing is easy for Jack. Nor for his friends (although he has few), who have a tendency to die. Even former friends suffer death by association. In fact, everyone and everything Jack cares about dies. That tendency plagues Jack again in this novel. Each new death adds another layer of grief and guilt to his life, sending him deeper into the bottle, even as he tries to cope by pursuing his own form of makeshift justice. I don’t know if there’s another protagonist in crime fiction who has such a good heart and such an awful life as Jack Taylor.

Jack is in love not just with books but with language, and is fond of mocking young people who have (in his view) corrupted it with words like “basically,” an all-purpose single-word answer to any question. Bruen uses Taylor to spew forth a running commentary on popular culture, including writers and films and television shows he admires and those he could do without. My favorite moment in this book comes when Jack tries to pick up a woman in a bar by discussing the merits of an Irish writer and, when the woman says “I don’t read,” responds “What the f--- is wrong with you?” Of course, the woman walks away. Story of Jack’s life.

The Ghosts of Galway might best be viewed as an interlude. Bruen cleans up some plotlines that have dangled in the last two or three novels, presumably paving the way for something new. I’m glad Bruen did that, but as a cleanup novel, The Ghosts of Galway is less satisfying than some of his other work. Which isn’t to say that the novel can't be enjoyed for the reasons that every Bruen novel is enjoyable:  the pop culture references, the dry wit, the laconic writing style. Bruen’s novels are known for their brutal endings, and this one has two. Jack is not the victim of the first, but then another, less obvious brutal moment arrives, another downer to plague Jack’s life, and all is right with the world.

I wouldn’t recommend The Ghosts of Galway to anyone who hasn’t read other Jack Taylor novels, because it probably won’t seem to go anywhere. To the extent that the plot deals with The Red Book, it kind of fizzles out. I would, however, recommend reading the series in order from the beginning, because the full arc of Jack’s life is what the series is ultimately about. I don’t know where the next novel will go, since Jack has almost no friends (or even enemies) left in his life, but as always, I look forward to reading it.

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