Review
PRAISE FOR KEN BRUEN
"Ken Bruen is hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibilityβ Bruen writes with extraordinary delicacy about a man driven to acts of violence out of wild grief and a fierce sense of guilt."β
Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
"Bruen is an original, grimly hilarious and gloriously Irish. I await the further adventures of the incorrigible Jack Taylor."βPatrick Anderson, Washington Post
"Bruen is a brilliant, lyrical, deeply moving writer who can make you laugh and cry in the same paragraph and whose characters are so sharply portrayed that they almost walk off the page at you. If you like Ian Rankin, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and the like, Bruen is definitely a writer to reckon with."β
The Denver Post
"Bruen's furious, hard-boiled prose, chopped down to its trademark essence, never fails to astonish.... among the finest noir stylists of his generation." β Publishers Weekly
"Bruen's tommy-gun prose, lacerating dialogue, and hard-boiled worldview combine to provide entertainment of high order in dealing with low instincts."β New York Daily News
"The next major new Irish voice we hear might well belong to Ken Bruen."β Chicago Tribune
"Spare and unforgiving, Bruen's novels are among the best."β Rocky Mountain News
"Ken Bruen is a supremely bold and confident stylist."βJocelyn Clark, Sunday Tribune (Ireland)
"A Celtic Dashiell Hammett."β Philadelphia Inquirer
Product Description
Acclaimed Irish crime writer Ken Bruen has won numerous awards for his hard-charging, dark thrillers, which have been translated into ten languages. In Headstone, an elderly priest is nearly beaten to death and a special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises and Jack Taylor has encountered most of them. 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.
Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this organization seems like it will act as a death knell to every aspect of Jackβs life. Jackβs usual allies, Ridge and Stewart, are also in the line of terror. An act of appalling violence alerts them to the sleeping horror, but this realization may be too late, as Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of Jackβs life and the heart of Galway. A terrific read from a writer called βa Celtic Dashiell Hammett,β Headstone is an excellent addition to the Jack Taylor series (Philadelphia Inquirer)