A rogue priest has stolen the fabled Red Book from the Vatican - a book that decries the gospels, one of the earliest acts of heresy in the church - and has fortuitously holed up in Galway, Jack Taylor’s part of the world. Jack’s wealthy employer has tasked him with retrieving it for him - but others are on its trail. Elsewhere, a protest/terrorist group calling themselves The Ghosts of Galway has moved up from dumping animal carcasses in public areas to shooting coppers - and the bane of Jack’s life, Emily/Emerald/Em, is involved and has dragged him into the mess.
The Ghosts of Galway is as full of happenings as all of Ken Bruen’s novels usually are, and the book is similarly an effortless and enjoyable read - Bruen’s prose is next level - but I didn’t think it was as good as some of his other Jack Taylor books. Not all of the storylines here, including the subplots, work as well - The Red Book storyline and how that develops is really strong but the titular group and what they were up to was less so.
The group is weirdly indistinct in their purpose and their evolution from protest group to minor terrorist group felt contrived and unconvincing - like it just sort of happened and was rather pointless overall. They only seemed like generic bad guys and no real threat to the main characters. Maybe it’s because I read Galway Girl first (yeah I didn’t read the series in order…) but I found Emerald to be not as badass as a very similar character from that book, Jericho, so her scenes were underwhelming.
The subplot involving his neighbour Doc and his plan to climb Everest, which somehow might have involved Jack, wasn’t that interesting, not to mention laughable given Jack’s physical health! But the one about the little girl who wants Jack to find her imaginary missing brother was compelling, mainly for its oddity, with a very dark twist at its conclusion.
The Red Book storyline was fun - you knew Jack would circle back to the rich guy Alexander Knox-Keaton but the surprise was what he was also involved with. I liked the agent Sheridan who enlightens him on what Knox-Keaton got up to and the very John Wick-direction the story takes after a certain point.
Plenty of deaths keep things interesting and the ending’s great. Ken Bruen is so good at endings, making them seem simple and easy, it makes you wonder why no-one else can pull them off with such finesse. Although maybe this is one of the benefits of genre fiction, particularly bloody crime fiction - they tend to only end in one way.
Overall, the various strands of the novel don’t come together in as powerful a way as they have done in novels like In the Galway Silence and Galway Girl, but I still got some entertainment out of The Ghosts of Galway and it’s definitely worth a read for fans of Ken Bruen.
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