Read this book over 4 years ago and failed to write a review: I should have, for Ken Bruen writes gritty, noir-ish tales that I rip through in a hurry!

Great book. Typical Ken Bruen. No one else quite like him. Highly recommend. I have read most of Ken's novels and The Ghosts of Galway rates up there with the best of them.

Always a joy and pleasure to read any Jack Taylor novel by Ken Bruen. This one was cracking and had an unforgettable ending. Always highly recommended.

Ken Bruen writes beautifully and Jack Taylor is a favorite of mine. As per usual, he is not in good health or spirits. After a stint in a hospital, Taylor, former cop, is a night watchman. Things are never easy for Jack and his angst has some grace notes. He is asked by his Ukrainian boss to find a lost book in the possession of a Vatican priest hiding out in Galway, which happens to be a relatively small city compared to Dublin or other possible hideouts.

Jack, though, remains a tortured man--her by the ghosts of those he's lost and others lost in Galway.

The plot was a bit confusing, but Bruen is a delight to read.

Yeah, this book didn't really get me at first. I tried to read at least two times but I couldn't get through the first 50 pages. Maybe it wasn't the book for me, or maybe it wasn't a great timing.

This was the first novel I’ve read of Jack Taylor and despite the dark atmosphere and writing, I found myself enjoying it.

After being misdiagnosed and being involved in a scandal due to it, former cop Jack Taylor has almost everything he needs: his whiskey, his books and his faithful watchdog Storm. Everything, but money. In an attempt to restart his life, Jack gets a job as a night security guard. It doesn’t take long before things are given a turn. When a man offering a considerable sum of money to find “The Red Book”, the first book of heresy, approaches him he knows its way over his head. When a woman from his past reappears in his life and seemly connected to the book, Jack is pulled to a probable deadly path. Haunted by the dark, unfortunate events of his life, Jack soon discovers that the city’s corner hide secrets and some more fatal than others. Unfortunately, for Jack, nothing in his life went as he expected, and this won’t either. Can he make it out alive and with the rest of his sanity?

One thing that I learned with this book is: never take a plot for granted. This is a story that starts at a steady pace and suddenly it takes a much darker and shocking turn, one where the reader realises that characters are going to meet their ends. The first part of the novel the reader faces several plot lines and different characters. In the end, everything comes together perfectly and the revelation is unexpected.

The depth of the characters was something that impressed me. Even though I haven’t read the previous books, I got glimpses of the past of each character and ended being fascinated with a few. None of them is simple, they are all complex Emerald was one of the best for me. She’s a complex character not only due to her multiple personalities but also her determination to hold on to her consciousness. She’s both the source and the weakness of poor Jack. There are moments that I felt my heart squeeze a little for him and his torments. Jack is a complex character that has been both virtues and flaws. He’s a lost character that suffers most of his misadventures due to bad decisions mostly. As the reader is taken through a combination of what he’s doing and his thoughts and feelings, one way or the other, they grow attached to him. He takes time to look back on his life, to confront some of his ghosts and to reflect on his mistakes and his decisions. For me as a reader, it taught me a few lessons.

The style of writing is great. It’s smooth, flows perfectly with the events of the story adapting to the general mood of the plot and of the characters. The author’s vivid imagination and rich vocabulary are seductive and pull the reader to such depth that even when it gets gruesome, it’s very hard to let go of the book. It’s a distinctive style, worth remembering.

I think that I should read the previous ones to truly see how much the characters and the author’s style developed through the series. It can be read as a stand-alone but it still felt like I was missing something.

I recommend this novel to all the fans of a complex, thrilling story that stands out for all the right reasons.

Another fine chapter in an excellent series. I like hoe Bruen is able to keep his characters consistent and plots fresh.

Ken Bruen at his best.

tseb sih ta neurB neK.

Read this book.

I received a free Kindle copy of The Ghosts of Galway by Ken Bruen courtesy of Net Galley  and Grove Atlantic, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

I requested this book as the description sounded interesting.

This book was a major disappointment. It is not a stand alone novel. You will need to read the prior 12 books in the series to have a good understanding of the main characters and themes in this book. The author's writing style is choppy and unorganized at times (could be due to the my prior observation) making it a difficult read. It is far from engaging and interesting.

I cannot recommend this book without anyone going back to the beginning and starting with the first book in the series which I hope is better than this one.

A heretical book has been stolen from the Vatican; its contents promise to upend Christianity. No, we haven't entered the pages of a Dan Brown novel (although that author is name-checked in The Ghosts of Galway). The Red Book, reputedly a ninth century refutation of The Book of Kells, is, for the most part, a MacGuffin, Jack Taylor has been hired to find it by a wealthy factory owner with ties to the Ukrainian mob for whom he works as a security guard.

Taylor, a former member of the Irish Gardaí (police force) and the protagonist of a dozen previous novels by Bruen, has fallen upon hard times. He has an attempted suicide in his recent past after a mistaken terminal illness diagnosis, and enough scars on his body to narrate his violent history. And yet Bruen manages, through his poetic style and lyrical presentation to elevate Taylor from simple ruffian to hero.

Violence follows Taylor everywhere he goes. He locates the priest who supposedly stole The Red Book, but the man ends up murdered shortly thereafter. Suddenly no one wants anything to do with Jack's quest, least of all the man who hired him. To top things off, the story takes place during a year when many of Taylor's favorite musicians are departing this mortal coil and radical nationalism is sending shivers through the Western world. Taylor is an avid consumer of popular culture, and Bruen's novels can be used as an introduction to any number of other crime writers whose books line Taylor's shelves or the box set crime series he's taken to bingeing.

People are always asking Jack, a champion of lost causes, to do virtually impossible things, but he's never had an assignment like the one he accepts from a young girl who wants him to find her brother. She scrimps together a paltry finder's fee but, from all indications, the "missing" boy has never existed.

What of the supposed ghosts referenced in the title? Just when it seems like things couldn't get any stranger, dead livestock are being left in Eyre Square, apparently an act of social protest by an ultra-right group with nefarious intent—one perhaps more sinister than it at first seems. A sexy goth named Emerald, a sociopath with more personalities than Taylor has drinks every day, with whom Taylor has a complicated history, enters the picture, which can only mean things will go from bad to very much worse.

Bruen's Galway, or at least the part of it that Jack Taylor inhabits, is a dire, brutally violent place. Taylor has a kind of Midas touch where seemingly everyone he comes into contact with dies. There is a mystery to be solved here, but not much actual detection in a private investigator sense. Taylor doesn't follow clues so much as he blunders about causing trouble for everyone and himself. That Bruen writes so directly and lyrically (and briefly—his books are quite short) only makes the violence that much more terrible.

This book may not be the best entrance point into Bruen's series, as it involves threads from a few recent novels, but it is another solid entry into one of the strangest and most wonderful crime series.

This book has just reminded me why I love Ken Bruen’s writing so much! Once again, we catch up with ex-Garda, Jack Taylor who when he isn’t drinking to forget the heartbreaking losses in his life, spends his days working as a private investigator. Bruen is one of those writers who can perfectly capture humour and tragedy in the same sentence. You find yourself smiling at Jack’s sarcastic conversations - the brilliant ‘thought one thing, said another’ rants - and then you’re left speechless as a moment later Bruen announces a character’s death. Simply stunning! You can’t but like Taylor. You feel his passion, understand his hatred, sympathise with him as he battles to understand the modern world and ultimately why he has to resort to violence. If you’ve not read Bruen before - do!

Describing the plot of Ken Bruen’s The Ghosts of Galway is missing the point. There’s a malignant priest, a vicious ex-boss and pleading ex-lover, a heretical book, a menacing millionaire with violent tendencies, an even more menacing movement leader with a thuggish sidekick, and a diabolical, brilliant, and fascinating woman who all impinge on former cop Jack Taylor’s drinking time.

He’s learned he is not going to die and his suicide attempt failed, as well. I guess like Dorothy Parker, he might as well live so he can still drink. He’s working as a security guard, is hired to find a book stolen from the Vatican like something out of a Dan Brown novel, but the resemblance ends there. There are mysterious animal murders, corpses brazenly dumped in public areas, the work of the “Ghosts of Galway” a new cult-scam run by a master manipulator. An estranged friend is murdered. And it all ties together in some weird and awful way that only Jack can see, but can he find the will to stop it.



The Ghosts of Galway is the thirteenth Jack Taylor novel by Ken Bruen and the first I have read. I have been missing something, though I am afraid I can’t jump in and binge read because this is about as grim and cynical a series as I have ever read. The mystery is not much of a mystery and most of the discovery consists of the guilty telling Flynn about their guilt, but I still finished in awe of this book. It’s not a whodunnit, nor a how-dunnit or why-dunnit. It’s a how-long-will-this-go-on-dunnit. When will Jack act?

Bruen captures 2017 with Jack’s wry cynical mentioning of events in the news. The death of Bowie, Prince and the rise of Farage, Trump, the devolution of democracy, the corruption and growth of nationalism. Bruen writes like a poet, with odd line breaks, fragments, and staccato delivery and so he creates a story of mood. Don’t get me wrong, a lot happens, so many murders, so much wrong, but while there is all this action, it’s not the story, the mood, the psychic wound and recoil that Jack goes through is the story. It was stunning and I am still stunned by it. This is not a book to read if you are in despair, it will break your heart too many times over. But there is beauty in the prose, a brilliance that shines through the grim hopeless tragedy of it all.

I received a copy of The Ghosts of Galway from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Ghosts of Galway at Grove Atlantic
Ken Bruen

Jack is an unusual character and the writing is unique. The narrative is complex with plenty of action, but I never especially liked Jack or cared what happened. That's on me though - just not my favorite kind of book. I think many would absolutely love it.

Very well written and intriguing book. (4-star review on Amazon)

THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY: A Jack Taylor Novel
Ken Bruen
Mysterious Press
ISBN 978-0-8021-2733-4
Hardcover
Thriller

No one writes like Ken Bruen. He makes his own rules, breaks established ones, then rewrites his own. I have read all of his books, including the newly published THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY, with my hands over my eyes, peeping, afraid of what I was about to read next. When I started reading THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY I thought, “Please, please, don’t xxxx xxx xxx.” He did. Such is the man’s talent that when he did “xxxx xxx xxx” it was totally unexpected. Do you remember how your parents taught you to cross the street? You wait until a car passes, look left, look right, then look left again and cross. That wouldn’t help you in a Ken Bruen book. You would go through the motions, start to cross, and then that car that passes would come rolling up on you in reverse and come back again just for grins and giggles. Bruen, in other words, writes what is real.

Jack Taylor is Bruen’s defrocked garda, as it were, a rough, drunken angel of Galway who still maintains the frock, as it were, in the form of the coat which he still refuses to turn in despite multiple requests. Taylor over the course of well over a dozen books has been spiraling lower and lower, to the point where whether or not he is going to make it to a subsequent installment is a near thing either way. It’s best --- and a test of stamina --- to start at the beginning of the canon and work your way through, but if you pick up THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY as a Bruen virgin you will find your way through to end by following the breadcrumbs of the past which Bruen has so carefully lain with casual aplomb throughout the narrative. You will also, as a bit of lagniappe, find a list of literary and musical references and recommendations peppered throughout THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY (and, indeed, the Taylor volumes which have gone before) but the main course is the story itself. Bruen defies editing. He, through Taylor’s voice, gives the same information two or three times throughout the course of the book. The pacing is helter-skelter, without a moment going on for a page or two at one point and several important incidents being covered in the course of a paragraph, as if an editor was standing behind him with a stopwatch in one hand and a Glock in the other. To put it another way: THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY (and Taylor, and Bruen) come at the reader at the speed of life. Those who wonder why bad things seem to happen all at once, without a breather, will particularly appreciate THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY, wherein Taylor is retained by a loathsome individual tied to the Ukrainian mob to appropriate The Red Book, which is reputed to be the first true book of heresy, from the hands of a defrocked priest. Taylor is not really inclined to take the job. The lucre which his erstwhile patron offers is too good to pass up, however, and, given that Taylor is recuperating from a near-fatal illness as well as a failed suicide attempt, he reluctantly takes the job. Taylor gets put at cross purposes with the ghosts of his present and past in the form of new and old flames, but whether either or both will make it to the end of the book is anyone’s guess. He also makes new enemies and antagonizes old ones while doing the same with
scars of his own and others. Then, of course, there are the ghosts of Galway, who haunt his sleeping and waking hours, waiting for him to join them. It does not seem at any one point in this disturbing work that that they will be waiting for long.

Does THE GHOSTS OF GALWAY sound like fun? It is not. But it is brilliantly and darkly told, a sweet mother’s milk that is terminally poisonous but well nigh irresistible after one taste. It does not take an especially long time to read, but should be lingered over. Once you are finished, you will want to visit or revisit its predecessors as the case may be, in order to prepare yourself for the next installment. Strongly recommended. But be prepared to have your skull fractured and your heart broken.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2017, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bruen writes some of the darkest, twistiest thrillers around. And this is one of his best.

This book is like a bad acid trip: bursts of bright colors, streams of wild words, eruptions of passions, and occasionally threads of a story. It seemed like an extended advertisement for Jameson whiskey. Yet, I stayed with it to the end, and had a certain amount of appreciation for the conclusion. Read this book for the adventure of reading, not for the story.

Ken Bruen is one of my favorite writers and with each title in the Jack Taylor series, he only cements that position. I'm particularly fond of the last few titles in the series, in which he introduces an ambiguous supernatural element to the fray. Sparse, yet poetic; lithe yet lyrical, The Ghosts of Galway is, like the books that preceded it, a prime example of an author at the top of his game.

I am a huge Bruen fan and have read everything he has written. This is his 13th Jack Taylor book and it as engaging as everything else in his oeuvre. You could read this as a stand-alone, but the series really does fit together in such a way as to make starting from the beginning more rewarding.

Bruen's books are dark and edgy and this one is more so than most.

I love so many things about this book, but do wish--as I always do with Mr. Bruen--that his books were a bit longer. I guess it is natural to want more of a great thing.

I will continue to read and buy Bruen's books as long as he continues to put them out. There is nobody who writes dialogue that is as sharp, witty, and abrasive. I love it and give The Ghosts of Galway an enthusiastic 2 thumbs up.