Green Hell: A Jack Taylor Novel [Paperback]

The award-winning crime novelist Ken Bruen is as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. InGreen Hell, Bruen's dark angel of a protagonist, 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 on sobriety; and his firing from the Irish national police is 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. Jack unexpectedly gains a new sidekick after rescuing a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs. The student, a Rhodes scholar, decides to devote himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway's most magnetic rogue. Between pub crawls and street fights, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos, putting both the student and himself 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 color has a lethal sheen.

“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 Chl“'