books:

	The Guards: A Novel (Jack Taylor Series) Ken Bruen St. Martin's Minotaur, 2004 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I am certain that if you read this one you'll be hooked. It's 2:30 in the morning and I couldn't put it down. That's the best compliment you can give an author.

Jack Taylor is often drunk. He hangs around drinkers and flirts with the insanity that constant drunkenness and binge drinking create. All of his relationships have been gunned down in the crossfire of alcohol. His friend Sutton is a vicious man that on rare occasions of sobriety, Jack rationalizes and explains to himself. He is kind to winos as in the ancient Padraig. He says 'I drink with'em; then buy them a foolish wreath when they die.' His closest friend is Sean, a bar owner. All of this takes place in Galway, Ireland, where Jack Taylor has disgraced himself and been cashiered out of the Siochna Guards, nearly impossible to do, and lost everything along the way.

A lovely woman, Ann, asks Jack to disprove the notion, public and private, that her teenage daughter committed suicide, and thereby proving that she was murdered. Jack begins to suspect that she stepped in front of harm's way from a part-time job she had at a business owned by shady characters.

There's a lot of James Crumley's "The Wrong Case" in The Guards. There is one enormous difference: we generally dislike Milo Milodragovitch and we can't help rooting for Jack.

Bruen's humor is infectious. Jack visits his father's grave when Ann takes him to see the marker for her daughter, Sarah, and mutters, "Da, I'm here by default. But aren't we all?" His assistant "finder," Cathy B. who is a (just past) teenage ingenue in the subculture of the Irish Rock world, is marrying another performer and asks Jack to give her away, explaining the criteria of her request, "You're the oldest man I know." Later, one of the characters asks of the recent disappearance of another character, "Did he die or did he go to England?"

Twists and turns up to the last page, retribution, reality, dialogue, sadness, introspection, coming to grips with the consequences of one's acts. This may be the best mystery I read this year! Kudos to Bruen.

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BRILLIANT!!!

This is a very slim volume which I was unable to put down and therefore read it in one day.Jack Taylor is a former member of the Guards-the Irish Police force-who was thrown out for belting a higher officer in the mouth.He is fighting a mostly losing battle with the bottle on a daily basis-sometimes winning but more often backsliding. He becomes what is known in Galway as a "finder"-private detectives being unknown, and is hired by a woman to solve the mystery of her teenage daughter's suicide.His quest leads him to a ring of molesters who seem to kill for thrills.We meet several of Jacks friends who are also living on the edge of society and although this should make it a dark,bleak book, somehow it avoids being depressing because of his masterly writing style.Ken Bruens habit of using just 3 words to summarise a point worried me at first until I realised that this was a perfect way to express,very succinctly,his whole point.Brilliantly done and can't wait to read more.

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"Believable, in-your-face, and real...."

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. 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.

Maybe Ken Bruen is doing for Galway 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................

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9

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