The Galway Tourism Office will not be using the quote that local private investigator Jack Taylor offers: "It's Galway. If you let the weather dictate your life, you'd never go out." The good people in Tourism will probably also want to downplay what happens when Taylor (in very fine form for the ninth crime novel of this rollicking, sublimely nasty series, after The Devil) goes out of an evening.
A Church reform group, the Brethren, hires Taylor to locate a certain Father Loyola Dunne who has absconded with the Brethren's sizable funds. Nothing is as it seems, Taylor discovers, although he is not surprised. When it comes to priests and their methods, he has seen it all and forgotten none of it. As he interviews people with knowledge, he finds that all Galway harbors resentment against higher authorities (bankers, police and, of course, the Church) very similar to his own. Everyone is angry, and nobody is angrier than Taylor, who freely admits, "I'm bad-tempered naturally--my mother's legacy. Fear makes me dangerous." Some forces are so foolish as to try to scare him.
Rival private investigators, his employers in the Brethren and a lunatic cult dubbed Headstone act to push Taylor over the edge, and they suffer grave consequences. But readers will relish the nonstop mayhem unleashed through Galway streets as much as the dark-dark-dark humor of Ken Bruen who testifies, "Jack persisted with his philosophy of the law being for courtrooms and justice being for alleyways." --John McFarland, author