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Summary
Summary
Jack Taylor is walking the delicate edge of a sobriety he doesn't trust when his phone rings. He's in debt to a Galway tough named Bill Cassell, what the locals call a "hard man." Bill did Jack a big favor a while back; the trouble is, he never lets a favor go unreturned.
Jack is amazed when Cassell simply asks him to track down a woman, now either dead or very old, who long ago helped his mother escape from the notorious Magdalen laundry, where young wayward girls were imprisoned and abused. Jack doesn't like the odds of finding the woman, but counts himself lucky that the task is at least on the right side of the law.
Until he spends a few days spinning his wheels and is dragged in front of Cassell for a quick reminder of his priorites. Bill's goons do a little spinning of their own, playing a game of Russian roulette a little too close to the back of Jack's head. It's only blind luck and the mercy of a god he no longer trusts that land Jack back on the street rather than face down in a cellar with a bullet in his skull. He's got one chance to stay alive: find this woman.
Unfortunately, he can't escape his own curiosity, and an unnerving hunch quickly turns into a solid fact: just who Jack's looking for, and why, aren't nearly what they seem.
The Magdalen Martyrs , the third Galway-set novel by Edgar, Barry, and Macavity finalist and Shamus Award-winner Ken Bruen, is a gripping, dazzling story that takes the Jack Taylor series to explosive new heights of suspense.
Author Notes
Ken Bruen was born in 1951 in Galway, Ireland. He was educated at Gormanston College, Meath and later at Trinity College Dublin where he earned a PhD. in metaphysics. He spent 25 years as an English teacher in Africa, Japan, Asia and South America. Ken Bruen's works include the well reeived White Trilogy and a book entitled The Guards, which won a Shamus Award .He also edited an anthology of stories set in Dublin entitled Dublin Noir. His writing speciality is crime fiction. Some of his other works include The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, and The Dramatist and Priest, which was nominated for the 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. Ken Bruen is also the recipient of the first David Loeb Gooodis Award in 2008 for his dedication to his art.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
If not as explosive as The Guards (2003) or The Killing of the Tinkers (2004), Edgar finalist Bruen's third Jack Taylor noir mystery-thriller crackles with his trademark tough-guy bravado. While Taylor struggles to stay on the wagon, he agrees to do a favor for Galway gangster Bill Cassell, who wants him to track down Rita Monroe, one of the martyrs of the title-unwed mothers sent into the care of the church and terribly mistreated, often by the nuns in charge of them. Cassell pushes Taylor hard to find Monroe, but Taylor's need for alcohol gets in the way. And as usual in a Bruen novel, his employer's motives aren't what they seem, violence springing naturally out of the disconnect. Along the way, Taylor sleeps with a client's mother, attends a good friend's funeral and loses his entire library. He often seems to float and drift, less driven by his demons than distracted by them. Still, readers will appreciate Bruen's trademark stripped-down noir poetry, his superbly rendered sense of place and his evocative portrait of a person balanced on the razor's edge. Agent, Marianne Gunn O'Connor. (Mar. 21) Forecast: A blurb from George Pelecanos and a 10-city author tour will help raise Irish author Bruen's profile in the U.S. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Private eye Jack Taylor, late of the Garda Siochana, the Irish National Police and any condition remotely resembling sobriety, is down and out in Galway in the third entry in this relentlessly dark yet never dreary series (The Killing of the Tinkers, 2004, etc.). A summons arrives from Bill Cassell, Galway gangster and figure of authentic evil. He's done Jack a favor asked out of dire necessity, and now he's calling his marker. Find a woman named Rita Monroe, orders the reptilian Cassell. It's not the blood-chilling imperative Jack had been dreading, but he knows better than to relax, and he's right. The search for Monroe leads him to a group of young women horrifically exploited and tortured while being forced to labor not in some primitive Third World country but in the heart of Galway. The revelations bruise Jack's spirit as severely as the parallel investigation into his own addictive and destructive personality. At length, Jack finds Rita Monroe, achieves long-overdue justice for the brutalized women and maybe, just maybe, takes one small step toward personal redemption. Jack's Orwellian journey is often painful, but there are compensations. An array of good writers, from Ralph W. Emerson to George P. Pelecanos, are quoted throughout. It's a class of writer that includes Bruen himself. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In his third case, Galwegian ex-cop Jack Taylor-- The Guards0 (2002), The Killing of the Tinkers 0 (2003--buries some old friends and enemies while meeting some intriguing new ones, thanks to the addition of pills to his coterie of demons (booze, cocaine, and books). This time Jack's progress toward self-destruction is slowed both by a desultory search for a fallen angel linked to a hellish Catholic laundry and by his probe into the black habits of a sexually voracious widow. The series' real draw, though, has never been the story lines; rather, it's the eclectic, lyrical screeds pouring forth from the narrator's ruined heart. Some readers may balk at Taylor's constant literary references (in the midst of a beating, he descants on Henry Green, a "writers' writer's writer"), but these allusions are fueled by the same hard spiritual and physical thirst for sublimity that make him such a compelling existential antihero, not to mention a handy readers' advisor. Suffice it to say that fans of Roddy Doyle, James Sallis, Samuel Beckett, Irvine Welsh, Frederick Exley, Patrick McCabe, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, and Chuck Palahniuk will all find something to like, love, or obsess over in this stiff shot of evil chased with heartbreaking irony. Highly recommended. --David Wright Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This third entry in Bruen's Jack Taylor series (The Killing of the Tinkers) is arguably the bleakest to date, but also the best. When a local thug hires Jack to track down a woman, it seems like an easy way to repay an outstanding debt. Not until he's in too deep does Taylor realize that it's not a simple identity trace, and that his client may have been playing him all along. While flashbacks in time are kept to a minimum, it's clear that Jack's search is somehow related to events that happened decades ago at a home for wayward girls. Jack juggles his search with another case, one in which he becomes involved with the woman he's hired to investigate. Jack is often a hard man to like, and he spends a great deal of the book hitting potholes on his meandering path to redemption. For all that, he remains completely compelling, and Bruen continues one of the best current crime series. Recommended for most public libraries. Bruen lives in Galway, Ireland.-Craig Shufelt, Lane P.L., Oxford, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.