Jack Taylor has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead and the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and other substances; and his firing from the Irish national police is by now 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 developed a savage habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore.
One late spring day, Jack rescues a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs with baseball bats and unexpectedly gains a new sidekick.
The student, in Galway on a Rhodes scholarship, abandons his treatise on Beckett and instead devotes himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.
Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jacks vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos, putting both himself and the student in danger.
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 colour has a decidedly lethal sheen.
Ireland’s lyrical master of crime fiction spins a new alcohol-fuelled Jack Taylor plot, featuring a Rhodes scholar gone astray, a professor with a violent streak, and a young woman who might be more unstable than Jack.
'Taylor is a classic figure: an ex-cop turned seedy private eye . . . The book’s pleasure comes from listening to Taylor’s eloquent rants, studded with references to songs and books. His voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.'—Seattle Times
'Ken Bruen, Ireland’s first real crime novelist . . . the Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel . . . Bruen writes in machine gun fashion, his words verbal bullets that rip through the veneer of the safe bourgeois Catholic society in which he was reared . . . The acerbic wit and off-the-wall comments throughout all the books are somewhat reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.'—Irish Times
'Ken Bruen doesn't need a lot of words to tell his tales of perpetually falling Irish angel Jack Taylor—he knows the right ones. Bruen gets more done in a paragraph, a word, even a fragment of a word, than most writers get in an entire four-hundred page doorstop. If his prose was any sharper, your eyeballs would bleed.'—Mystery Scene
'One sign of a winning detective series is how much fun the author has with the creation. In the 11th Jack Taylor novel, Green Hell, Ken Bruen is having a shameless good time . . . Go ahead—crack open Green Hell and have some fun.'—Shelf Awareness
'The Taylor series is generally very pleasurable to read . . . filled with a glorious love of the language and an engaging protagonist who is unlike almost any other. It’s unclear at this point how many more go-arounds Taylor has left in him . . . but it will be a privilege to be with him for as long as he’s able.'—Strand Magazine
Ken Bruen received a doctorate in metaphysics, taught English in Africa, and then became a crime novelist. The critically acclaimed author of ten previous Jack Taylor novels and The White Trilogy, he is the recipient of two Barry Awards and two Shamus Awards and has twice been a finalist for the Edgar Award. He lives in Galway, Ireland.
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 developed a savage habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore.
One late spring day, Jack rescues a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs with baseball bats and unexpectedly gains a new sidekick.
The student, in Galway on a Rhodes scholarship, abandons his treatise on Beckett and instead devotes himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.
Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jacks vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos, putting both himself and the student in danger.
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 colour has a decidedly lethal sheen.
Ireland’s lyrical master of crime fiction spins a new alcohol-fuelled Jack Taylor plot, featuring a Rhodes scholar gone astray, a professor with a violent streak, and a young woman who might be more unstable than Jack.
Praise for Ken Bruen
'Taylor is a classic figure: an ex-cop turned seedy private eye . . . The book’s pleasure comes from listening to Taylor’s eloquent rants, studded with references to songs and books. His voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.'—Seattle Times
'Ken Bruen, Ireland’s first real crime novelist . . . the Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel . . . Bruen writes in machine gun fashion, his words verbal bullets that rip through the veneer of the safe bourgeois Catholic society in which he was reared . . . The acerbic wit and off-the-wall comments throughout all the books are somewhat reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.'—Irish Times
'Ken Bruen doesn't need a lot of words to tell his tales of perpetually falling Irish angel Jack Taylor—he knows the right ones. Bruen gets more done in a paragraph, a word, even a fragment of a word, than most writers get in an entire four-hundred page doorstop. If his prose was any sharper, your eyeballs would bleed.'—Mystery Scene
'One sign of a winning detective series is how much fun the author has with the creation. In the 11th Jack Taylor novel, Green Hell, Ken Bruen is having a shameless good time . . . Go ahead—crack open Green Hell and have some fun.'—Shelf Awareness
'The Taylor series is generally very pleasurable to read . . . filled with a glorious love of the language and an engaging protagonist who is unlike almost any other. It’s unclear at this point how many more go-arounds Taylor has left in him . . . but it will be a privilege to be with him for as long as he’s able.'—Strand Magazine
Ken Bruen received a doctorate in metaphysics, taught English in Africa, and then became a crime novelist. The critically acclaimed author of ten previous Jack Taylor novels and The White Trilogy, he is the recipient of two Barry Awards and two Shamus Awards and has twice been a finalist for the Edgar Award. He lives in Galway, Ireland.
