Once Were Cops by Ken Bruen Review

Matt O’Shea realises his dream of being a cop in the NYPD when he gets transferred from Galway to New York on secondment. But he gets paired with mean loner on the force, Kurt “Kebar” Browski, and the two start a tense partnership. Something’s not right about either though - Shea has strange “zonings” where he loses consciousness and does… things… during these fugue states, while Kebar is somehow able to keep his mentally-challenged sibling in a fancy nursing home on a beat cop’s salary. Both cops’ secrets lead them towards an increasingly dark and bloody fate…

Ken Bruen’s Once Were Cops is, like all of his stories, unpredictable and compelling, though parts of it were kinda dull at times, aspects of it were too convenient (every Chief of Police is a pedo apparently!), and ultimately he attempts too many twists, ending things in an unsatisfying way.

The first two-thirds of the novel plays out like a gruff buddy cop story. Which is fine, though it doesn’t seem to have much of a point and so the narrative is a bit slow with stretches without much happening. It’s only when Shea starts talking about his ambiguous “zoning” does the point of it all start to emerge. It’s quite surprising to have two protagonists in a story and have them both be either unlikeable or shockingly diabolical, but that’s what I like about Bruen: he never writes the kind of story you think he will simply because he’s writing in a particular genre.

For the final third of the novel, we’re introduced to a completely different character and the story finds the next gear it’d been missing for much of it - the last third turns into the page turner I anticipate when I pick up a Ken Bruen novel. And, while the twists Bruen throws in throughout help make the narrative more lively, he gets carried away right at the end which almost makes the novel feel like a farce. Just seems odd to go to that extent and then do what they did - if that was the plan all along, why not do it sooner?

Having read a couple of them now, Ken Bruen’s non-Jack Taylor novels (who makes a cameo at the start of this one) don’t seem to be as tightly-plotted or as exciting but Once Were Cops is still as effortless a read as any of his books. Well-written and sporadically entertaining, it’ll appeal mostly to fans of the author though its originality may also appeal to more general crime fiction fans looking for something a little unusual from the typical police procedurals. Overall, it’s not up there with Bruen’s better novels but I enjoyed it well enough.