Green Hell

Ireland's master of poetic crime fiction, called "an Irish treasure" by Shelf Awareness, spins a new alcohol-fueled Jack Taylor plot, featuring a Rhodes scholar gone astray, and professor with a violent streak, and a young woman who almost makes Jack look tame.

The award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen is a as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. In the new Jack Taylor novel Green Hell, Bruen's dark angle of a protagonist 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.

But Jack isn't about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues preppy American student on a Rhodes Scholarship for a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick, who abandons his thesis on Beckett to write a biography of Galway's most magnetic rogue.

Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals toward chaos. Enter Emerald, an edgy young Goth who could either be the answer to Jack's problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing. Ireland may be known as a "green Eden," but in Jack Taylor's world, the national color has a decidedly lethal sheen.