Michael O'Shea is a member of Ireland's police force, known as The Guards. He's also a sociopath who walks a knife edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from the States go to Ireland, Shay, as he's known, has his lifelong dream come true--he becomes a member of the NYPD. But Shay's dream is about to become New York's nightmare.
Paired with an unstable cop nicknamed Kebar for his liberal use of a short, lethal metal stick called a K-bar, the two unlikely partners become a devastatingly effective force in the war against crime.
But Kebar harbors a dangerous secret: he's sold out to the mob to help his sister. Her rape and beating leaves her in a coma and pushes an already unstable Kebar over the edge just as Sheaβs dark secrets threaten boil over and into the streets of New York.
Once Were Cops melds the street poetry of Brooklyn and Dublin into a fast-paced, incomparable hard-boiled novel. This is Ken Bruen at his best.
From Publishers Weekly
In this stripped-down dark thrill ride from Edgar-finalist Bruen (The Guards), a psychotic Irish cop, Matthew Patrick O'Shea (everybody called me Shea), blackmails his way into a green card and a police exchange program that takes him from Galway to New York City for a one-year stint with the NYPD. Partnered with the brutal Kurt Kebar Browski (he looked like a pit bull in uniform), the clever sociopath, who has a hidden predilection for serial rape and strangulation, brazenly advances his ambitions despite intense attention from Internal Affairs and a mobster named Morronni. An acknowledged master of contemporary noir, Bruen touches all his usual themes in his trademark clipped postmodern style, a deft shorthand that enables him to romp at will through genre clichΓ©s to quickly reach deeper and more dangerous depths. No one is safe as this shocker spins wildly toward a violent finish. (Oct.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
While the critics found this gritty noir tale compulsively readable, they didn't exactly know what to make of it. O'Shea is a charming narrator despite his split personality and inclination toward evil (his murder weapon: a green rosary), and reviewers found both O'Shea and his NYPD partner psychologically compelling. They also praised the short, choppy prose, which seemed appropriate to the story, and the dark, gruesome twists and turns. But the novel, devoid of pity or emotion and full of violence, may not please all readers. The reviewer from the Washington Post sums it up: "Once Were Cops is designed to appeal to readers with less refined sensibilities."
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