Showing results by author "Ken Bruen" in All Categories

Thirteen bibliomysteries by best-selling and award-winning authors are contained in this first of volume of a must-listen collection. 

Jack Taylor, traumatised, bitter and hurting from his last case, has resolved to give up the finding business. However, he owes the local hard man a debt of honour and it appears easy enough: find “the Angel of the Magdalen” – a woman who helped the unfortunates incarcerated in the infamous laundry. He is also hired by a whizz kid to prove that his father’s death was no accident. Jack treats both cases as relatively simple affairs.

Jack Taylor, a disgraced ex-cop in Galway, has slid further down the slope of despair. After a year in London he returns to his home town of Galway with a leather coat and a coke habit. Someone is systematically slaughtering young travellers and dumping their bodies in the city centre. Even in the state he's in, Jack Taylor has an uncanny ability to know where to look, what questions to ask, and with the aid of an English policeman, apparently solves the case.

Ex-cop-turned-PI Jack Taylor has finally escaped the despair of his violent life in Galway in favor of quiet retirement in the country with his friend Keefer, a former Rolling Stones roadie, and a falcon named Maeve. But on a day trip back into the city to sort out his affairs, Jack is hit by a truck in front of Galway’s Famine Memorial and left in a coma - but mysteriously without a scratch on him. When he awakens weeks later, he finds Ireland in a frenzy over the so-called “Miracle of Galway”.

Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana, and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. He is teetering on the brink of his life's sharpest edges, his memories of the past cutting deep into his soul and his prospects for the future non-existent.

Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober - off booze and pills, and nearly off cigarettes. One reason: his dealer's in jail. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn't - can't - because the man's sister is dead and the guards have called it "death by misadventure." But the dealer says that can't be true and begs Jack to see what he can find.

As well-versed in politics, pop culture, and crime fiction as he is ill-fated in life, Jack Taylor is recovering from a mistaken medical diagnosis and a failed suicide attempt. In need of money - and with former cop on his resume - Jack has been hired as a night-shift security guard. But his Ukrainian boss has Jack in mind for a bit of off-the-books work. He wants Jack to find what some claim to be the first true book of heresy, The Red Book, which is currently in the possession of a rogue priest who is hiding out in Galway after fleeing the Vatican.

Jack Taylor thinks he has a chance at last to rest and heal from the myriad mental and physical traumas that beset him. However, after a skateboarder long suspected of dealing drugs to children is shot dead in mid-air during a public performance, Jack receives a cryptic message with a picture of the skateboarder, a clipping about a rapist gone free through procedural error, and a chilling invitation: "Your turn." The note is signed simply "C 33."

America - the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: - but not for PI Jack Taylor, who's just been refused entry.Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an over-friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that this stranger seems to know rather more than he should about Jack.Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway.

Jack Taylor 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. Once again, trouble comes to him - this time in the form of a wealthy Frenchman who wants Jack to investigate the double-murder of his twin sons. Jack is meanwhile roped into looking after his girlfriend's nine-year-old son 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"....

Evil has many guises and Jack Taylor has encountered most of them, and has the scars to prove it. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland that leave even the national police shaken. And Jack is especially vulnerable now that he has finally found love and happiness.

The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that "The Dramatist", a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns Jack's refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he's maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss.

Jack Taylor has never quite been able to get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom. Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the local Garda is murdered. After another Guard is found dead, and then another, Taylor’s old colleagues from the force implore him to take on the case.

Irish crime-fiction sensation Ken Bruen and cohorts shine a light on the dark streets of Dublin. Dublin Noir features an awe-inspiring cast of writers who between them have won all major mystery and crime-fiction awards. This collection introduces secret corners of a fascinating city and surprise assaults on the "Celtic Tiger" of modern Irish prosperity.

Jack Taylor has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Garda, is ancient history.

Five valuable lessons you can learn by listening to Bust: When you hire someone to kill your wife, don't hire a psychopath. Don't use Drano to get rid of a dead body. Those locks on hotel room doors? They're not very secure. A curly blond wig isn't much of a disguise. Secrets can kill.

Kaum zehn Minuten aus dem Knast, bricht Mitchell auch schon einem Punk den Arm...

Two guards; one nun; one judge. When a letter containing a list of victims arrives in the post, PI Jack Taylor is sickened, but tells himself the list has nothing to do with him. He has enough to do just staying sane. His close friend Ridge is recovering from surgery and alcohol's siren song is calling to him ever more insistently. A guard and then a judge die in mysterious circumstances. But it is not until a child is added to the list that Taylor determines to find the identity of the killer, and stop them at any cost.

Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: A long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking lot attendant is rude to a series of customers, the "Manners Killer" makes sure that the next thing either sees is the beginning of his own grisly end.

Max Fisher used to run a computer company; Angela Petrakos was his assistant and mistress. But that was last year. Now Max is reinventing himself as a hip-hop crack dealer, and Angela is back in Ireland hooking up with a would-be record setter - in the field of serial killing. Will their paths cross again?