Customer Reviews

Ammunition (Inspector Brant)

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In London Police Inspector Brant grieves as only he can the death of his hero by toasting in a pub the late great author Ed McBain who he learned recently died. As he drinks another round to Mr. McBain for his wonderful police stories, someone starts shooting at Brant. Hit several times by the assassin, Brant is rushed to a nearby hospital.

Although police officers hate a cop killer, everyone at the station who works with the cantankerous cop celebrates the fact that Brant is on medical leave. However, the bullets only made Inspector sourpuss even more acrimonious; he vows to take down everyone associated with his failed hit.

Paying homage to Ed McBain and his 87th Precinct tales, Ken Bruen provides a strong look at a London police station after one of the cops has been shot. Besides Brant's prime story line that cuts across the other subplots as he is the star of the series, readers see other cops struggle with their demons as well. Falls deals with fascinating psycho Angie James who blames her for her prison time (see VIXEN); and McDonald is an out of control cocaine addict who wrecks havoc on a civilian watch. The seventh Brant police procedural is a terrific action-packed thriller, but even with the return of Vixen, it is the avenging inspector who makes the mean streets of London meaner and more fun for fans of Mr. Bruen, the heir to Mr. McBain's police station tales.

Harriet Klausner

Ireland is known for producing some of the greatest writers in Western literature. But few would consider Joyce or Yeats or Shaw to be mystery or crime writers. The prolific Galway writer, Ken Bruen, is an award-winning mystery author who has been called the "Celtic Dashiell Hammett." Bruen is changing the way Americans think about Irish writers by producing some of the best mysteries on the market today.

AMMUNITION is the seventh entry in Bruen's police procedural series set in London. It does not disappoint. Bruen continues to take the procedural format made famous by Ed McBain in his 87th Precinct series and turn it on its ear. The result is a delightful book that is impossible to put down. This is a story about cold-blooded murder, vigilante violence, illicit drug use, law breaking, backbiting and hatred in South East London. And that's just among the cops.

The novel starts with the attempted assassination of the most famous cop in the Met, the totally amoral and often brutal Sergeant Brant, who is referred to by both friends and foes alike as "an animal" or "the devil." When word spreads that he has been shot, the first reaction by all is the same: "Is he dead?" This is followed by disappointed silence when they hear the answer. Besides cops, those arriving at the hospital to stand vigil for Brant include "a whole gaggle of them (hookers)."

Brant is that type of guy. His closest thing to a friend on the force, Porter Nash, the gay diabetic, is assigned to find the shooter. Nash realizes: "Thing was, almost every single case, with Brant's unique style of policing, gave rise to a suspect. It was fast becoming...who wouldn't want to shoot him?"

To make matters worse, Brant's assailant takes to calling harried Chief Inspector Roberts, taunting him and promising to do the job right the next time. And a new sick social phenomena known as "Happy Slapping" plagues London's streets. Youngsters walk up to strangers, slap them across the face and record their stunned reaction on a cell phone. The results end up on the Internet.

Newly promoted Sergeant Falls is ordered to go down to Kennington and catch a "happy slapper." As the Metropolitan's sole black female cop, Falls is widely hated not for her gender or race but for her past screwups as a cop. And it turns out she passed the sergeant's exam on her final shot with the help of Brant, who stole the exam for her. But Fall's past is about to catch up with her, big time.

Bruen writes of Falls: "The past was not so much another country as a minefield of horror." A big part of that horror is a "nasty, psycho" serial killer named Angie, with whom Falls once had a brief lesbian fling. Needless to say, Angie could bring her world crashing down in an instant. And now Angie is somehow out of prison and stalking Falls.

Then there is disgraced Constable McDonald, bitter, drug-addled and stuck guarding a shopping center in the freezing cold. When he randomly bloodies a defiant teen, McDonald comes to the attention of a group of elderly vigilantes looking to take back their neighborhood from street hoodlums.

As if all this were not enough chaos, there appears on the scene a Yank. He is L.M. Wallace, a "terrorism expert" sent by American officials to assist the London police in looking for bombers. In Wallace, Bruen has created a character every bit as dangerous as Brant on his worst day. Wallace is a "dark side" figure who would scare the daylights out of Dick Cheney.

And, of course, there is still the somewhat shaken Brant, who makes a miraculous and quick recovery from his wounds. Bruen writes of Brant: "Yeah, fine, he was of Irish descent, he knew the painkiller that never failed. Tore open his drinks cabinet, nigh splintering the wood, grabbed the bottle of Jameson, a twenty-five year old beauty he'd been saving, twisted off the cap as if he was twisting the neck of some bugger, got a lethal measure poured into a heavy Waterford tumbler and drank deep, waiting for the magic to light his belly." And that, along with the help of one of his hooker friends, put Brant right back in the game. As Nash observes, "A focused Brant was a very dangerous animal."

Bruen moves the various plot lines along at a brisk pace. Much like the master of the procedural, McBain, Bruen can make his characters become so involved in another plot line that they forget momentarily the danger they face in their own. And like McBain, he can make you laugh at human foibles and absurdity one moment and then bring you right back into the random terror of modern life the next. Bruen writes of one character, unjustly set up by Falls: "He'd been walking along, his mind preoccupied by minor irritations. Oh, God, what he wouldn't give to have them back...Then f---, like hell opened up and Armageddon hit him."

This is a perfect description of noir. Bruen is a master of noir, taking that very American genre and putting a unique Irish twist on it. Books like AMMUNITION are quick, fun reads, excursions to the dark side of the street. If you haven't read them, then search out the entire series.

In true noir tradition these books have something to say about the modern world. They tell us that things are rarely what they seem on the surface. And at the end of the day, the world often contains more gray than black and white. Occasionally, AMMUNITION points out, the darkness wins out and the bullets find their target. But the struggle never ends.

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

Ken Bruen's irascible antihero Inspector Brant is brutal, boorish, and blunt, a bare knuckled brawler of a cop who offends all and regularly crosses over that line separated by jailhouse bars. In the first chapter of the prolific Ken Bruen's latest crime rant, Brant is gunned down in the local pub. Clinging to life but only marginally less abusive, Brant's colleagues of London's tough southeast precinct have a long list of potential perps - both on and off the force. But as noted on the book jacket, if your going to try and take Brant down, you'd better do it right, for there's not likely a second chance.

By ordinary crime thriller standards, "Ammunition" is pretty good stuff. But if like me you're a Bruen fan, you may find this one feeling a bit tired and listless - more of the same banter and interplay between the eclectic cast of London crime stoppers, and a Brant that, perhaps because of his rehabilitation - seems to be losing some edge. For sure, the black humor is not missing, and Bruen's dark and cynical undertones never flow too far beneath the surface. But unlike some of his recent thrillers - "American Skin", "Priest", "The Dramatist", or "Calibre" - which will haunt the reader long after the last page turns, "Ammunition" is a fast read, easily forgotten, and not much to recommend this fine author. If you're thinking about skipping one in the series, this is probably a good one to consider, while I'll nonetheless be anxiously awaiting Bruen's next installment.

Ken Bruen's "Ammunition" is my first Inspector Brant novel. I liked that the author made an effort in creating diversity among his characters in that there's a gay man, a black woman, an American all working in the police force in London here. There is also the game the author plays lightly with the reader for some characters love certain pop culture icons, be it Ed McBain and his detective novels or a song by Tupac like "Thugs Get Lonely, Too," and their preoccupations help ease the seriousness of the story when needed. I also liked that the author's style was over-the-top minimalist even though here or there I had to read a sentence three times before I got a running start on it since the author can delete words as well as reduce their quantity.

In this novel, Inspector Brant is more mythic than realistic. We're told he's a demon and that lots of people in the police department want to see him gone, whether killed or simply fired, it doesn't matter, but Brant is shot as the story opens and put in hospital for a good chunk of the story so that we don't really see him do a whole lot to deserve the reputation he's gotten, though he is no passive protagonist here by any means and he performs in ways that allow the reader to see he certainly could deserve the reputation everyone claims he deserves; it's just that he's not a center-stage protagonist first of all, and secondly, the author introduces several other interesting, even pathetic characters, who are wholly diverting at the start and occupy the reader's attention for a good middle portion of the novel while the Inspector Brant is in hospital.

One such character is the black woman in the story, Falls, a Sargeant who cheated on her upper-level entrance exam for the position of Sargeant. She is a police woman who hits another woman, a psycho-killer, over the head with a vodka bottle that nearly kills her merely for speaking arrogantly and out of turn. This black female sergeant is, like all the other characters in this novel, except perhaps the gay one, herself a very aggressive human being, someone willing to do anything to get to the top or to get her own way (including, arresting an innocent and destroying his reputation for life as well as murder). The story of Falls as a subplot to the main question as to who shot Inspector Brant and how shall "justice" be won, kept me going, turning the pages, not excitedly but compellingly nonetheless partly because of the brutality that became not only part of the bad characters but of the police as well. I also wanted to know how it all was going to end and whether or not there'd be a happy ending, despite the unrelenting moral decay and emphasis on criminal lowlife lifestyle of all the characters.

But i found myself, surprisingly, crying more than a couple of times as well while reading the novel, not because of any outright sadness expressed by the author or the characters nor because of any truly pitiable scene depiction, but because of the unrelenting and monolithic indifference to our fellow human beings palpably displayed in the story on every level, as if all the major characters were ultimately competing with the author for the position of the one main guy (or girl) who could feel the least the most often, whether physically or emotionally, while also doing the most damage to another human. The novel seemed to take on the qualities of simply watching a tyrannosaurus rex battle a mastadon over and over again but in human skin, watching one psychopath try to outbest, destroy and top another psychopath.

It's true that in the story one young innocent guy is released or saved from having his life be ruined by the calculations of those who are trying to topple and outbest the other, but it wasn't out of any moral principle that he was released and not deliberately destroyed; it was simply that the innocent young man was an obstruction to the criminal calculations of the other members on the police force, that's all, and he simply wasn't of any use to them.

Inspector Brant shows more of his psychopathic colors when he telephones his favorite hooker to his place for a quick hook-up, paying her not with cash but with the kind of favors only someone with real psychopathic power on the police force can dispense.

In the end, the author's relentless cynicism and engagement over characters who are no more than calculating psychopaths wrestling with each other for top position depressed me. I found the author engaging in very lazy writing, however minimalistic. I even found bad grammar, not by the characters as one expects, but by the narrator of the story. This book needs serious editing. Some of the scenes depicted seem stolen right from American tv police procedurals. And, finally, there are so many typos and poor font settings with this book, it is as if the publisher were on a drunk and didn't care.

One of the funniest parts of this novel is unintentional and a cultural accident. For an American reader, no matter how blood-thirsty and hardened the character that Ken Bruen presents here, once he or she expresses a desire for a cuppa or is found or caught drinking from a flask some TEA -- the character appears as a wuss instantly. Tough guys just don't drink tea.

Ken Bruen's reputation as a major Irish crime fiction writer is high, but this novel doesn't justify that reputation.

Ken Bruen can do more with a fairly short book that is long on dialogue than many other writers who feel compelled to load up their works with useless verbiage. He's not trying to win any artsy prizes for his writing, just trying to deliver a good story well told. As uusual, he succeeds with this book about the amoral Sgt. Brant and his cohorts.

The book begins with Brant being shot and ends on a somewhat enigmatic note, that will keep readers guessing until they read the next installment. Meanwhile, you just go along with the plot, which is, as I said above, dialogue driven, and it hooks you in and keeps you interested until the end of the book.

Once again we see the inner workings of the London police, and some of it is not pretty. There are bogus arrests, unnecessary beatings, gruesome murders and a panoply of other nasty things which don't put the police in a very good light. On their behalf, it appears that they really have a commitment to bring the bad guys to justice, even if the methods used are not what normal people would do. Brant doesn't have a lot to do in this book, because of his wounds, but his fellow officers pick up the police slack and soldier on until the end. I'm avidly awaiting the reading of the next book in this excellent series.

Ammunition, by Ken Bruen (236 pgs., 2007). Bruen is the co-author of Slide, another hard-boiled crime novel. He has published over 20 such novels. He's an Irish novelist, so perhaps it's taken some time for him to get known on this side of the Great Pond. Who knows? I could have just been missing his books. That's too bad for me. Especially, if they are all like these two books.
Ammunition is a book all lovers of the "Dirty Harry" movie series would love. It's Bruen's twenty-first published crime novel. The protagonist, Inspector Brant, out Dirty Harries the real Dirty Harry Callahan. Brant's beat includes some of the harshest places in London. Over the years, his vigilante style of policing has alienated most of his colleagues on the force & has frightened & alienated most of the criminal element. I say most of the criminal element because he maintains good relations with a large group of hookers. I say most of the force because he has an unlikely friendship with one of the few openly gay officers on the force & he still maintains decent relations with his old partner who is now his immediate boss & he has helped one of the few black women on the force pass her Sergeant's exam. However, all his friends eventually think they've made pacts with the devil, but they still believe in him.
Brant survives an assassination attempt at the beginning of this book. Toss in his search for revenge, an American so-called antiterrorism expert on loan from U.S. Homeland Security, a rouge cop who hates Brant, a psychotic triple murderer who got out of prison on a technicality & who hates Brant's sergeant friend, a group of senior citizens turned vigilantes who are led by the rouge cop, a suicide, or perhaps two suicides, lots of hard-boiled crisp writing; & the result is this book. Add a surprise twist at the end & you think sequel.

Bruen is one of the best modern crime authors and this is another very strong entry in his Inspector Brant series.

Brant is as anti- as heroes can get. He's a liar, a bully, a bigot, a boor, a vigilante -- and a great cop. You have to love him.

First, I'm a big fan of this series and, really, all of Bruen's stuff. And AMMUNITION is more of what I expect from him, EXCEPT for a GIANT GAFFE that screws up the entire book. SOMEWHAT OF A SPOILER FOLLOWS:


On page 28, an important character has eyes that are 'washed out blue as if they'd been bleached.' P. 113, same person has 'sharp, dark eyes.'

You may think I'm nitpicking but in genre fiction the details are often everything. You'll see when you read the book--I polished it off in one and a half sittings and, as I said, it's generally okay--that the eye stuff is NOT a minor error.

Ammunition is not a submission by an undergrad in his/her first creative writing workshop, it's the millionth book by a Shamus Award winner. As such, it deservers ZERO stars. Lazy writing, lazy editing (I noticed a few more typos in the book as well, but I don't really mark them).