Still reeling from the events of the last book, Jack Taylor emerges from a months-long drunk to find he’s become the target of a whackjob calling herself Jericho. Recruiting cop killers and thieves, Jericho’s arrived in Galway to kill Jack for revenge - and funsies. Except Jack’s also being framed for child murder - life’s never dull for this guy, and he’s not ready for death yet, so it’s time to grab his falcon and take on the latest nightmare!
This guy, Ken Bruen - what can I say? He floors me. Why is nobody talking about this writer? He’s incredible! I had an absolute blast with In the Galway Silence and, though I didn’t think he’d let me down with Galway Girl, I didn’t expect him to match the quality again - and he did! And, superficially, it’s pretty much the same kinda story again but manages to feel different too. And the same thing happened again to me - I thought I’d just read a few pages and ended up shotgunning the whole thing into the wee hours of the night! I really shouldn’t read these on weeknights because the mornings are brutal…
Jericho sounds like an absurd character with a silly name and yet Bruen writes her so damn well that you buy her totally. She’s basically a female Joker (I know some people are gonna say ‘Well, that’s Harley Quinn’ except Harley’s more or less a ‘good’ guy now - or a sympathetic one at least - and Jericho is anything but) building up her own gang of goons and spreading chaos gleefully. She’s terrifying but so entertaining to read about.
I gather from inferences that her motivations stem from a previous book in the series, The Emerald Lie maybe, though Galway Girl works fine as a standalone book so it’s not like you need to read anything else first.
I love Bruen’s writing style, and not just the content, which is rock solid, but the form as well. I like to see a page of prose divided up between dialogue and description - there’s nothing worse when you turn the page and you’re confronted with a block of text with nothing breaking it up. Bruen doesn’t always have dialogue in his scenes though and yet he still breaks up the descriptions and lays it out structurally like dialogue. I’ve never seen anyone do that in prose before - in poetry, sure, but that’s expected. It’s delightfully playful, particularly when juxtaposed with the dark material which perfectly matches Jack’s sardonic voice and the stories he appears in; it’s prose with personality.
I don’t know if I would call them criticisms because you could argue them away and did nothing to take away any enjoyment from the narrative either. A woman approaches Jack out of the blue and tells him a sob story - then, without doing any checking, he immediately goes after the guy she points to. It makes him seem a bit dim, being so easily manipulated, but you could argue that he’d been through a lot by that point in the story and wasn’t thinking clearly. As for Jericho, I’m not sure why she needed her two stooges, Scott and Stapleton, for her plan - but then she’s also completely cuckoo and does more than a few things without reason!
Other than that, Galway Girl is a flawless work of the highest tier of crime fiction. There’s always something interesting happening (characters getting killed abruptly, the tension gradually building), the story moves at lightning speed, you instantly get a strong idea of each character when they appear, the dialogue is fun, and the ending is fab. Ken Bruen is the most exciting writer I’ve discovered in recent years - basically anything with his name on and Galway in the title is a guaranteed banger. That is, if whiskey-soaked nihilism is your bag. Me, I can’t get enough. Sheer brilliance from start to finish.
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