Jack Taylor has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends has died and the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and other substances, and his firing from the Irish national police is by now ancient history. But Jack isn’t about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway.
One late spring day, Jack rescues a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs with baseball bats and unexpectedly gains a new sidekick. The student, in Galway on a Rhodes scholarship, abandons his treatise on Beckett and instead devotes himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway’s most magnetic rogue.
Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos. Emerald, an edgy young Goth, could either be the answer to Jack’s problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing. Ireland may be known as a “green Eden,” but in Jack Taylor’s world, the national colour has a decidedly lethal sheen.
Praise for Ken Bruen:
'The book’s pleasure comes from listening to Taylor’s eloquent rants, studded with references to songs and books. His voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful.' — Seattle Times
'Ken Bruen, Ireland’s first real crime novelist . . . the Godfather of the modern Irish crime noveld . . . The acerbic wit and off-the-wall comments throughout all the books are somewhat reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.' — Irish Times
'Bruen gets more done in a paragraph, a word, even a fragment of a word, than most writers get in an entire four-hundred page doorstop. If his prose was any sharper, your eyeballs would bleed.' — Mystery Scene
'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.'—Shelf Awareness
'The Taylor series is generally very pleasurable to read . . . filled with a glorious love of the language and an engaging protagonist who is unlike almost any other.' — Strand Magazine
