Jack Taylor and His Battle With the Galway Girl: by Kernan Andrews

BY KERNAN ANDREWS  As seen in the Galway Advertiser, Thursday, August 8, 2019
Ken Bruen's new novel to be published in November

'GALWAY GIRL' has been the title of both a Steve Earle song and an Ed Sheeran song. The term is about to be put to better use by the award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen in his forthcoming novel.

Ken Bruen; photo by Grace Bruen

Galway Girl, the latest Jack Taylor investigation, will be published in November. It will see Bruen's violent, hard living, hard drinking, yet at times compassionate private eye, take on a psychotic assassin who has been killing Garda officers in Galway city, one by one. Jack is a former guard who fell out with his colleagues long ago, but in this instance, they implore him for help. He agrees, and finds there is not one assassin, but three.

From Galway, Ken Bruen is the author of 11 previous Jack Taylor novels, The White Trilogy, and the recipient of two Barry awards and two Shamus awards. He has twice been a finalist for the Edgar Award.

No stranger to critical acclaim, Bruen's writing has been called "a meeting of Samuel Beckett and Ogden Nash" by the Chicago Tribune; Deadly Pleasures called the author “a unique voice in hard-boiled fiction, his prose is poetic, scatological, and spare to the point of making Hemingway seem verbose and overweight"; while BookPage said "Bruen’s novels are in a class by themselves".

If you are in Ireland, near Galway on Friday, September 20, Ken Bruen will read, along with the poet Kevin Higgins, at The Kenny Bookshop, Liosbán Industrial Estate, Tuam Road.