Buy new: $16.41
57 used and new from $2.90
Customer Rating:
First tagged "recommended" by Faye
see full specs tags: crime novel(4), hard-boiled(4), noir(3), hibernian noir(3), galway(2), alcoholism(2), ireland(2), atomicfiber, drama, dangerous, irish, amazon
Product Description
Seems impossible, nonetheless Jack Taylor is sober---off booze, pills, powder, and scarcely off cigarettes, too. The categorical reason he's been means to keep clean: his dealer's in jail, that leaves Jack though a source. When that play calls him to Dublin and asks a preference in a soiled, contemptible visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a drifting leap. But he doesn't, can't, since a dealer's sister is dead, and a guards have called it "death by misadventure."
The play knows that can't be loyal and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find out. It's accurately what Jack does, with varying levels of success, to make a living. But he's reluctant, maybe since of who's seeking or maybe since of a bad feeling flourishing in his gut.
Never one to give in to bad feelings or common sense, Jack agrees to a favor, nonetheless he can't presumably know a shocking, fatal consequences he has set in motion. But he and everybody he binds dear will find out soon, earlier than anyone knows, in a gaunt and fatal fourth entrance in Ken Bruen's award-winning Jack Taylor series.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #575043 in Books
- Published on: 2007-03-06
- Released on: 2007-03-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .68" h x 5.53" w x 8.30" l, .51 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Last seen in Bruen's The Magdalen Martyrs (2004), Irish investigator Jack Taylor is solemn and hating it in his stellar fourth outing. Things are looking adult for a well-worn detective—at slightest until a apparently random genocide of a sister of his drug dealer, who's now in jail. As Taylor pursues a well-read torpedo in Dublin, he gets endangered in a life of an aged flame, Ann Henderson, and her violent husband. A organisation of murky pike-wielding vigilantes adds additional piquancy to a mix. By now, readers know a Bruen regulation of a downward spiral, nonetheless there's no denying a efficacy of a tough dialogue, a frail scenes and Taylor's weary, crumpled-jacket appeal. Nor can many writers in any genre elicit a decrepit civic Ireland as good as Bruen. Few, too, can continue to broach engaging stories and even some-more engaging impression studies. With a riveting poser and a skilfully rendered protagonist, Bruen recaptures a immediacy and a impact of a initial dual novels in a array (The Guards and The Killing of a Tinkers). (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a multiplication of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Jack Taylor is--shock and horror!--sober. linging tenuously to a booze-free and nicotine-rationed regimen, he's perplexing to get his life in order. Not bloody likely. Taylor's jailed former drug play wants his daughter's torpedo caught. A possibility confront with an aged partner leads to Taylor being beaten meaningless with a hurley stick. And as murders multiply, it looks as if Taylor is in a crosshairs of both a torpedo and a vigilante organisation called a Pikemen. Tying it all together, somehow, is a work of John Millington Synge. Readers who worry that Taylor's gossamer seriousness will H2O down possibly his fractious celebrity or a generally offbeat interest of Bruen's books needn't be concerned. This one sports a same good brew of curmudgeonly observations and indeterminate informative references that has won Bruen a clinging cadre of fans. But while no one reads him for a detection, a tract here exceeds his possess standards for casualness, and a double-noir finale feels tacked on. The inclusive Bruen, still good, needs to locate a rigging if he wants to equivocate spinning his wheels. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Ken Bruen is tough to resist, with his painful Irish heart, dulcet tongue and dour noir sensibility…[Bruen] writes with unusual sweetmeat about a male driven to acts of assault out of furious grief and extreme clarity of guilt."--Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
"[Bruen's] Jack Taylor array is Grade-A Galway Noir…Bruen provides an judicious debate of a fast-changing Ireland" --Richard Lipez, The Washington Post
"Bruen's tommy-gun prose, lacerating discourse and hard-boiled universe perspective brew here, as before, to yield party of high sequence in traffic with low instincts. Forget all gossamer notions of a Emerald Isle--this things is black Irish." --Ron Givens, New York Daily News
"Bruen's books are always good value a effort."--Harper Barnes, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"It's Taylor himself, dangerous, ashamed cop, that we wish to review about.…If we haven't detected Bruen yet, what are we watchful for?" --Jane Dickinson, Rocky Mountain News
"You'll wish to urge during a overwhelming conclusions of The Dramatist…Bruen's talent shines."--Michelle Ross, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The same good brew of curmudgeonly observations and indeterminate informative references that has won Bruen a clinging cadre of fans." --Booklist
"There is a dark about Bruen's Ireland that never lifts. The gangling essay is heartless in the depiction of complicated depression, amicable malaise, and sum miss of hope." --Library Journal
Customer Reviews
Most useful patron reviews
14 of 14 people found a following examination helpful.
By James Clar
Reading Ken Bruen, as anyone who ever has will tell you, is like personification with fire; we know that your feelings, your emotions and your sensibilities are good to get burned, though we only can't conflict a roughly primal allure of a feverishness and flame. Well, reading THE DRAMATIST, a author's fourth novel featuring alcoholic ex-Guard Jack Taylor, will make cauterizing a tender haughtiness with a blow flame seem like a pleasing diversion. With Bruen's heading succinct prose, discourse as tough as Connemara marble and as pointy as an icy breeze off a Irish Sea, this one will - to steal a line from James Ellroy - leave we "reamed, steamed and dry-cleaned." And that's all before we get to a positively horrific and accursed issue on a novel's penultimate page. All that yawns forward of Jack Taylor during a finish of this illuminated work is finish dim and it seems unfit to detect of a approach whereby even he - a ultimate "survivor" - competence find his approach behind into a light.
The 3 prior Jack Taylor novels suffered from a fact that, in them, a author clinging so most time and appetite to introducing and exploring a tortured essence of his categorical impression that some elements of good tract growth were neglected. Not so this time around. In The Dramatist Bruen manages to wobble together an intriguing and unconditionally awake story line with a kind of in-depth impression investigate that is so most a partial of what creates this array so bloody good. This novel is still mostly character-driven, to be sure, though in it Bruen uses tract in use of impression and not merely as a required though unfortunate evil. All a pieces fit together here and all of Jack's chickens come home to roost. It's in this novel, in other words, that all of a fragmented, angled and differing aspects of Jack Taylor's life and celebrity - so painstakingly decorated in those 3 progressing books - fuse and redound to Jack like some kind of high-voltage karmic thunderbolt. This is crime novella created on a scale of Sophoclean tragedy.
If we are unknown with Ken Bruen's work in ubiquitous and with a Jack Taylor novels in particular, THE DRAMATIST is a good place to make a familiarity of both. It represents a author banishment on all cylinders. Fans of Bruen's work, and those already proficient with Jack Taylor, be forewarned: zero in those progressing novels will ready we for what transpires during a finish of this one. But, in retrospect, all there should have finished so.
Read a full content of this examination initial published in MYSTERY NEWS (August/September 2004)
5 of 5 people found a following examination helpful.
By Gary Griffiths
There is some tiny misapplication in describing Ken Bruen's "The Dramatist" as simply "noir". While all of Bruen's essay is dour - in-your-face crime novella with no courtesy for nonsensical domestic exactness or complicated niceties, "The Dramatist" reads like a chainsaw to a tummy - an romantic debate de force that will leave fragments of Bruen's damaged poetry vivid your subconscious weeks after you've incited a final page. Yeah, this is black - Stygian black, about as dim as novella gets.
Galway ex-Guard Jack Taylor is back, who as a preference to his detained former drug play is pulled into a examination of a genocide of a college student. The apparently random tumble down a boarding residence staircase, while tragic, looks soft enough. Except for a unexplained volume of Irish playwright J.M. Synge ("A Playboy of a Western World") tucked underneath her body. But what seems to primarily be an unexplained fluke turns sinister when a identical predestine visits another student. As approaching from Burke, a poser of a apparent murders, while compelling, fades a bit into a credentials underneath a ferocity and power of a ungodly and unrepentant Jack Taylor. And as always, a ridiculously good examination Bruen spices this bare-knuckled story with an heterogeneous collection of quotes from Synge (as expected), Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, Sean Burke, Matthew Stokoe, and several more. The Irish unhappy and fatalism reads as thick as a Galway sea tatter as Taylor lumbers by a crimes and destitute adore affairs as well, heading to a consummate that while wise with a tinge and timbre, nonetheless strike me like a two-by-four between a eyes.
The inclusive Bruen continues to write like nobody in a business today. I'll concede, if we suffer pleasing movement hero-type people true from People Magazine, finish with neat and happy small endings to hang them up, afterwards Bruen's angled tales of frugally created savagery might have we billing OT with your analyst. But if you're looking for that off-the-beaten lane nonconformist who'd cite to rewrite a genre than follow a pack, get to know this guy.
6 of 7 people found a following examination helpful.
By L. J. Roberts
Ken Bruen's essay is exceptional. It's tight, involving, brutal, funny, and comfortless all during a same time. While there is a poser here, it is unequivocally a investigate of Jack that is a focus. Although we famous a torpedo sincerely early on, and we saw a finish entrance only before it happened, it done a finish no reduction shattering. This is not an emotionally easy array to read, and positively not for a friendly reader, though one we can't rate rarely enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment