Vixen by Ken Bruen Review

Vixen is the first Ken Bruen novel I didn’t like and couldn’t pass off as being the fault of a co-writer like Jason Starr. It’s the fifth book in his Inspector Brant series, a series I’m not familiar with (besides seeing the 2011 film adaptation of Blitz starring Jason Statham - it actually wasn’t bad considering it starred Jason Statham) and a series I’m not going to pick up further books from.

A large part of why I didn’t like this one is the absence of any decent characters. I suppose Brant is the main character given the series is about him, but he comes off as someone who’s trying way too hard to be cool which is really off-putting. He doesn’t care about rank, he has sex with prostitutes, he does drugs - but he’s a copper whaaaa? He also says “yo” a lot - the novel was published in 2003 so maybe that was just the done thing back then, I don’t really remember, but it only adds to his formidable uncoolness.

The rest of the much-too-large police cast all kind of blur together into a similarly generic male character whose general twatishness makes them unlikeable and impossible to care about. Nash, McDonald, Roberts - they’re all just names rather than characters. If your idea of hard-boiled is a story featuring a cast of dickheads, you’ll love this one.

The story is about a femme fatale called Angie who hooks up with a couple of brain donors, stumbles across some dynamite and decides to randomly bomb parts of London for money. With such a meticulously put-together plan, how could they fail?? Having read Bruen’s later, far better Jack Taylor books with a similar structure/characters, like Galway Girl and The Ghosts of Galway, Vixen suffers from the comparison and reads like a dummy run for those later books.

The story isn’t particularly memorable or interesting and isn’t helped by the unrelentingly unimpressive and irritating cast, both cops and robbers. The prose is fine, so Vixen is a smooth read like all of Ken Bruen’s novels, but this was definitely the easiest one of his to put down. Brant, I hardly knew ye, and that was too much - Bruen’s Jack Taylor books are the ones to read over this weaker series and I would recommend checking those out instead of picking up anything featuring Brant.