One sign of a winning detective series is how much fun the author has with the creation. In the 11th Jack Taylor novel, Green Hell, Ken Bruen is having a shameless good time. The irascible, alcoholic, violent Taylor was booted from the Garda of Galway, Ireland, and has been taking the odd private investigation case ever since--and tossing back Jameson whiskey and Guinness Black wherever and whenever he can. A vigilante keen on vengeance, Taylor has no qualms about taking on crooked cops, malicious priests, ruthless tycoons or corrupt politicians. This time he's after a serial rapist professor of English literature and a spoiled rich kid dog-beater. Tagging along on these vendettas are a mysterious tatted and pierced local girl, Emerald McKee, and Brian Boru Kennedy, an American grad student who came to Galway to do a dissertation on Beckett but instead got sidetracked into writing a biography of Taylor--even though his disapproving girlfriend asks him why he thinks "a book about a broken-down Kojak in the west of Ireland is going to fly."
Bruen's novels are short on plot and long on character, but they give him a rousing platform to share his own eclectic taste in contemporary fiction, music, TV and movies. Green Hell hardly reaches 10 pages before he name-drops Tom Waits, Jim Crumley, James Gandolfini, Massive Attack and House of Cards. This is part of the allure of the Jack Taylor novels. As Kennedy writes in the notes for his biography: "I liked to quote Beckett. Jack quoted Joan Rivers." Go ahead--crack open Green Hell and have some fun. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.