The Killing of the Tinkers : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Ken Bruen's voice is tragically comedic and highly addictive
Review: "Leaving Galway, I'd left behind a string of deaths.... The investigation had led to.... Three murders. Four, if you count my best friend. My heart being hammered. Tons of cash. Exile."

Jack's back. Wisecracking ex-Garda Jack Taylor is back in Galway after a spell in London. He's brought little more than a coke habit back with him. Now, hanging out at his new favorite pub (defined: one that still allows him in), he tries to reclaim his drinking habit too. While he would prefer nothing more than to nurse a pint --- or, better yet, several pints --- and drown the woes of his Irish past, trouble finds him sitting there on that stool.

A tinker named Sweeper seeks him out and invokes a name from a death Jack looked into, the one that sent him fleeing Galway at the end of THE GUARDS. Jack tries to brush him off, but finds himself unable to turn away.

I said, "Call me if you need anything."
"I need one thing, Jack Taylor."
"Name it."
"Find whoever's killing my people."

Sweeper tells Jack of several deaths among the young tinkers, and of the Garda's response: none. They're only tinkers, after all. He pays Jack well to find the killer. Whether Jack is actually up to the task is debatable at best.

There's always more to Jack Taylor's days than the pursuit of clues. He has friends with crises, strangers with more crises, and an abundance of his own personal crises. Most times, he faces all of these by getting drunk. To his credit, he manages to solve the mystery, despite some rather untidy side effects. The bulk of the entertainment isn't in Jack's sleuthing abilities, though, but in his interactions with others, be they friend, foe, authority figure, mom, wife, girlfriend, lad or lass. He is one idiosyncratic character, full of acerbic quotes: "Lord knows, feeling bad is the skin I've worn almost all my life." Ken Bruen's dubious "hero" is the epitome of a guy you love to hate. Worse, though, he's the guy you hate to love, which you definitely do, at least in his role as the caustic, reluctant PI.

Last year I read THE GUARDS, wherein Bruen introduced Jack Taylor. I have spent many long months waiting for the second, all-too-short, installment of Taylor's adventures. Bruen writes with a unique, if unconventional, style that I find refreshing. Once you get into this book's rhythm, I think you will find it hard to return to stories with long, flowing sentences and showy descriptions. What a voice this author has! Not pretty, not happy, not uplifting, but tragically comedic and highly addictive.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Rating:
Summary: Ken Bruen's voice is tragically comedic and highly addictive
Review: "Leaving Galway, I'd left behind a string of deaths.... The investigation had led to.... Three murders. Four, if you count my best friend. My heart being hammered. Tons of cash. Exile."

Jack's back. Wisecracking ex-Garda Jack Taylor is back in Galway after a spell in London. He's brought little more than a coke habit back with him. Now, hanging out at his new favorite pub (defined: one that still allows him in), he tries to reclaim his drinking habit too. While he would prefer nothing more than to nurse a pint --- or, better yet, several pints --- and drown the woes of his Irish past, trouble finds him sitting there on that stool.

A tinker named Sweeper seeks him out and invokes a name from a death Jack looked into, the one that sent him fleeing Galway at the end of THE GUARDS. Jack tries to brush him off, but finds himself unable to turn away.

I said, "Call me if you need anything."
"I need one thing, Jack Taylor."
"Name it."
"Find whoever's killing my people."

Sweeper tells Jack of several deaths among the young tinkers, and of the Garda's response: none. They're only tinkers, after all. He pays Jack well to find the killer. Whether Jack is actually up to the task is debatable at best.

There's always more to Jack Taylor's days than the pursuit of clues. He has friends with crises, strangers with more crises, and an abundance of his own personal crises. Most times, he faces all of these by getting drunk. To his credit, he manages to solve the mystery, despite some rather untidy side effects. The bulk of the entertainment isn't in Jack's sleuthing abilities, though, but in his interactions with others, be they friend, foe, authority figure, mom, wife, girlfriend, lad or lass. He is one idiosyncratic character, full of acerbic quotes: "Lord knows, feeling bad is the skin I've worn almost all my life." Ken Bruen's dubious "hero" is the epitome of a guy you love to hate. Worse, though, he's the guy you hate to love, which you definitely do, at least in his role as the caustic, reluctant PI.

Last year I read THE GUARDS, wherein Bruen introduced Jack Taylor. I have spent many long months waiting for the second, all-too-short, installment of Taylor's adventures. Bruen writes with a unique, if unconventional, style that I find refreshing. Once you get into this book's rhythm, I think you will find it hard to return to stories with long, flowing sentences and showy descriptions. What a voice this author has! Not pretty, not happy, not uplifting, but tragically comedic and highly addictive.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Rating:
Summary: Tinkers and Stinkers
Review: Any worthwhile book should enable the reader to suspend disbelief; The Killing of the Tinkers did let me suspend disbelief, but I could not suspend distaste. The plotting in this book was weak and the protagonist did more drugs than detecting.

The author, with self-conscious references to George Pelecanos, tried to use use song titles to establish mood; it did not work. It read more like playlists from the author's iPod than prose.

I gave up after 138 pages.

Rating:
Summary: Jack Taylor Plumbs the Depths
Review: At the end of THE GUARDS, the prequel to this book, Jack Taylor leaves Ireland for London. Now he's back, although any sign of a fanfare for his return is sadly missing. I though Ken Bruen took Jack Taylor just about as low as it is possible to take a character in THE GUARDS, but he's managed to follow that dark excursion up by plunging him into an even deeper canyon in THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS.

He's not long back home when he is sought out by a man who needs his help. Of course, Jack is in a pub at the time and has no problem listening to the man, a tinker named Sweeper. He explains that someone has been savagely murdering, occasionally including dismemberment, the young men from his clan. The feelings towards the tinkers (sometimes otherwise known as gypsies) range from dislike to fear and hatred, so the suspect pool could be very large. Sweeper has resorted to turning to Taylor for help because the Garda Siochana (the Irish police force), of which Taylor used to be a member, have not bothered to investigate preferring to write the deaths off as the result of a feud between tinker families.

It's a pretty grim sounding situation and a difficult case, but when the offer of free accommodation is included with a healthy pay packet, jack can't refuse.

Just because he has agreed to take the case, taken the tinker's money and moved into a tinker's house, it doesn't mean he will throw himself into a full-scale investigation. His intentions are honorable, mind you, but the temptations of the many pubs see him succumbing all too often, mixing his alcohol consumption with a steady supply of cocaine.

He makes progress on the case thanks mainly to the help of a policeman friend from London, but there are external factors that also adversely affect his progress. When he isn't being harassed by his ex-colleagues from the Garda, he is being severely beaten by men who despise tinkers or he's being hounded by nuisance suspects. Somehow amongst all of this drama, drug-taking and intrigue, Jack also manages a couple of relationships and accompanying break-ups. Yes, there's certainly a lot going on and emotions are being whipped from high to low.

This is a bleak story filled with noir themes. A sense of hopelessness surrounds Jack who is either unwilling or unable to save himself even while he's trying to help others. The mood isn't improved by the repeated warnings given to us in Jack's narrative that mistakes and oversights he is making will later result in tragedy. Armed with this fact from quite early I was on my guard to trust nothing and nobody, but Bruen was still able to produce an ending that moved me.


Rating:
Summary: "Believable, in-your-face, and real...."
Review: 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................

Rating:
Summary: A solid private investigative tale
Review: Jack Taylor left the GUARDS and Galway for London to sober up and redeem himself while starting over. Now a year later, he slinks back to Galway, but a pint keeps beckoning him as his old haunts call him until he finally surrenders to the siren of his favorite pub. He is mentally lower than he ever has been.

The tinker Sweeper wants to engage Jack's services to stop the serial killer and mutilator of his gypsy clansmen. Sweeper informs a sober Jack (talk about Gypsy luck - rare moment when Jack is not in his suds) that the Garda Siochana couldn't care less that a few Gypsies are dead. Reluctantly, Jack begins investigating as only he meanderingly can. Jack finally solves the twisted case only to capture the wrong person.

Though Jack's alcohol problems are treated too lightly (a notch above Foster Brooks), his sleuthing is fun to follow as his path is so nonlinear, readers will believe he has no prayer of solving anything but his next drink. When he is not on the case his anti hero antics can become irritating. On the other hand, Ken Bruns provides a deep social message that detox most likely will fail if the person returns to the exact environment that helped cause the addiction. THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS is a solid private investigative tale with just a few too many personal sidebars to gulp in one drink.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: A solid private investigative tale
Review: Jack Taylor left the GUARDS and Galway for London to sober up and redeem himself while starting over. Now a year later, he slinks back to Galway, but a pint keeps beckoning him as his old haunts call him until he finally surrenders to the siren of his favorite pub. He is mentally lower than he ever has been.

The tinker Sweeper wants to engage Jack's services to stop the serial killer and mutilator of his gypsy clansmen. Sweeper informs a sober Jack (talk about Gypsy luck - rare moment when Jack is not in his suds) that the Garda Siochana couldn't care less that a few Gypsies are dead. Reluctantly, Jack begins investigating as only he meanderingly can. Jack finally solves the twisted case only to capture the wrong person.

Though Jack's alcohol problems are treated too lightly (a notch above Foster Brooks), his sleuthing is fun to follow as his path is so nonlinear, readers will believe he has no prayer of solving anything but his next drink. When he is not on the case his anti hero antics can become irritating. On the other hand, Ken Bruns provides a deep social message that detox most likely will fail if the person returns to the exact environment that helped cause the addiction. THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS is a solid private investigative tale with just a few too many personal sidebars to gulp in one drink.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Odd, quirky - and thoroughly enjoyable.
Review: This is an odd, but thoroughly enjoyable, novel. Set in Galway, Ireland, Jack Taylor is an alcoholic and cocaine addict, recently bounced from the Guards. He arrives back in Galway, looks up old friends, consumes quantities of booze and coke and is approached by a man who wants him to help solve the murders of several "tinkers," formerly known in less politically correct days as Gypsies.

Taylor's approach to things is, putting it mildly, chaotic. He is given to a love of old rock 'n roll music, has an expectedly odd assortment of friends, makes enemies easily and suffers fierce hangovers.

But he does solve the mystery in the end in an unpredictable way.

Overall, Bruen's writing is wonderfully quirky. Jack Taylor is a well developed character; so well-developed, in fact, that he's not particularly likeable. Most of the other characters are kind of thing, but passable.

The plot . . . well, it isn't a smooth and winding road, that's for sure. But the twists are fun to roll with. A satisfying excursion with an author with a unique approach. If half-stars were a possibility, I'd give it four and a half. Not quite a five, but well worth reading.

Jerry