[Jack Taylor 02] • Toxic Blues

When Jack Taylor blew town at the end of Ken Bruen's dazzling novel The Guards, his alcoholism was a distant memory and his sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes. Now Jack's back in Galway a year later with a new leather jacket on his back and a pint of Guinness on his mind. So much for new beginnings. Before long he's sunk into his old patterns, lifting his head from the bar only every few days. But a gypsy arrives one day during a moment of Jack's clarity and changes all that. Young men of this gypsy's clan are turning up dead in the center of town and Jack's former employers, the Guards, the Irish police, aren't about to do anything about a bunch of dead tinkers. Jack agrees to look into it, knowing but not admitting that getting involved is going to lead to more bad than good. Of course, in Jack Taylor's world bad and good are part and parcel of the same lost cause. Ken Bruen wowed critics and readers alike when he introduced Jack Taylor in The Guards; he'll blow them away with The Killing of the Tinkers, a novel of gritty brilliance that will cement Bruen's place among the greats of modern crime fiction.