Ken Bruen is a singular voice in crime fiction "with his ear for lilting
Irish prose and his taste for the kind of gallows humor heard only at
the foot of the gallows" (New York Times Book Review). In The Ghosts
of Galway, he brings those elegiac talents to bear on a case involving
a famously blasphemous red book and Bruen's equally profane antihero
Jack Taylor.
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, currently in the possession
of a rogue priest who is hiding out in Galway after fleeing a position
at the Vatican. Despite Jack's distaste for priests of any stripe, the
money is too good to turn down. Em, the many-faced woman who has had a
vise on Jack's heart and mind for the past two years, reappears and
turns out to be entangled with the story of The Red Book, too, leading
Jack down ever more mysterious and lethal pathways.
It seems all sides are angling for a piece of Jack Taylor, but as The
Ghosts of Galway twists toward a violent end, he is increasingly
plagued by ghosts--by the disposable and disposed of in a city filled
with as much darkness as the deepest corners of Jack's own mind.
