Kate Mitchell, ex-heroin addict and Maria Callas lookalike, inherits a valuable cottage from her dead aunt in Galway and leaves Brooklyn to start a new life in Ireland. Except a Mexican cartel is attempting to flood the west coast of Ireland with meth and the head of this operation, Diogenes Ortiz, happens to have a thing for deceased opera singer Maria Callas. Will Dio successfully woo the wary Kate? Not if she finds out he was the one what offed her aunt in the first place! Throw in more Cartel enforcers, American Special Forces, a US Marshal, and a very perplexed ex-cop/ex-priest and gallons of booze and Galway’s gonna be covered in blood once more courtesy of Ken Bruen!
I’ve read some of Bruen’s non-Jack Taylor novels before and found them to be just ok. I’d hoped Callous would be better, considering those novels were published in the ‘00s and this one was published more recently in 2021, but it’s actually about the same as those others - just so-so, unfortunately. Something about Jack Taylor seems to bring out the best in Bruen apparently.
Part of the problem is that there’s too many characters, none of whom are particularly likeable, without a main character among them. I suppose Tommy Mitchell, Kate’s ex-cop/ex-priest brother, who’s despised by the family for rather puzzling reasons, would be that, as he’s the only one written in the first person, but he’s also quite a weak character, in all meanings, and not someone I particularly cared about reading.
I’m in two minds on this. On the one hand, underwriting your characters makes them feel like ciphers and hard to care about, much less understand (for example, Kate’s actions are unfathomable throughout); but it also allows Bruen to surprise the reader with how certain scenes play out which makes for a more exciting narrative. The approach has its positives and negatives.
As ever, Bruen wears his influences on his sleeve, praising Sara Gran’s character Claire DeWitt and Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens but he goes further than normal in this novel, actually putting proxies of those characters here. Kate is basically Claire DeWitt and Mason, the US Marsal, is Raylan. Besides being an odd choice, it shows how thin his characters are in comparison to these other writers’ stronger characters.
Keegan, Dio’s enforcer, was actually good though - I enjoyed his scenes the most, and the ones he shared with Mason brought out the best in that character too. Dio is delightfully terrifying given his unhinged mentality - Bruen writes villains the best. “Callous” doesn’t just describe the attitudes of several characters, or even sound like “Callas” as in Maria Callas, but could be an accurate way to label Bruen’s writing style and the general tone of his storytelling!
The narrative is rather vague throughout - it’s sorta about revenge for the Mitchells and money for Dio and co. It’s not the most compelling story, with the occasional strange left turn (why did Colin and his crew do that thing near the end?) though it does have a number of entertaining scenes and Bruen’s prose is effortlessly fluid to read as always.
Callous isn’t the most gripping or memorable of Ken Bruen’s narratives, but, as a fan of his brand of stories, I still enjoyed parts of it to make it worth picking up. If you’ve never read this author before though I would start with his Jack Taylor books instead; his non-Jack novels aren’t quite as inspired.
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