A New York Times Best Mystery of the Year: A hard-drinking detective deals with double murder and an elusive vigilante.
After much tragedy and violence, Jack Taylor has at long last landed at contentment. Of course, he still knocks back too much Jameson and dabbles in uppers, but he has a new woman in his life, a freshly bought apartment, and little sign of trouble on the horizon—until a wealthy Frenchman comes to him with a request to investigate the double murder of his twin sons.
Jack is meanwhile roped into looking after his girlfriend’s nine-year-old, and is in for a shock with the appearance of a character out of his past. The plot is one big chess game and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious player: a vigilante called “Silence,” because he’s the last thing his victims will ever hear.
This new novel filled with suspense and pitch-dark humor comes from a Shamus Award-winning author who’s been called “hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibility” (TheNew York Times Book Review).
“The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel.”—Irish Independent
Ken Bruen (b. 1951) is one of the most prominent Irish crime writers of the last two decades. Born in Galway, he spent twenty-five years traveling the world before he began writing in the mid 1990s. As an English teacher, Bruen worked in South Africa, Japan, and South America, where he once spent a short time in a Brazilian jail. He has two long-running series: one starring a disgraced former policeman named Jack Taylor, the other a London police detective named Inspector Brant. Praised for their sharp insight into the darker side of today’s prosperous Ireland, Bruen’s novels are marked by grim atmosphere and clipped prose. Among the best known are his White Trilogy (1998–2000) and The Guards (2001), the Shamus award-winning first novel in the Jack Taylor series. Bruen continues to live and work in Galway.