The Killing of the Tinkers (Jack Taylor) [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Ken Bruen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2010 | Series: Jack Taylor

At the end of Ken Bruen's dazzling novel The Guards, Jack Taylor's alcoholism was a distant memory and sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes. A year later, Jack's back in Galway with a new leather jacket on his back and a pint of Guinness on his mind. Before long he's sunk into his old patterns. But a gypsy arrives during a moment of Jack's clarity and changes all that.

Available only in Mystery 4.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With his second Jack Taylor crime novel (after 2003's The Guards), Irish author Bruen confirms his rightful place among the finest noir stylists of his generation. A year after the newly sober Jack Taylor left Galway to start a new life in London, the former member of the Gardai Siochana (the Irish police) returns home, a failed marriage behind him. The PI is sinking back into alcoholic oblivion when an Irish Gypsy, Sweeper, approaches Jack for help in solving the murders of a number of young men in his clan. The Guards aren't interested, since, after all, "it's only tinkers... and everyone knows, they're always killing each other." The quintessential outsider himself, Jack empathizes with the roaming Gypsies and feels comfortable in their company. Enlisting the aid of Keegan, a burly cop friend from London, Jack sets about investigating the killings, while at the same time he struggles to keep his own personal demons under control. Bruen's spare, lean style reads like prose poetry. Indeed, beneath the surface of Jack's jaded, self-destructiveness is a romantic with a poet's sensibilities. An autodidact, Jack continually references his literary heroes, from Chester Himes to Thomas Merton. Next to his bottle of Jameson is always a book to help him through the hard times: "I needed Merton and a pint. Not necessarily in that order." This is a remarkable book from a singular talent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Jack Taylor, who left town at the end of The Guards [BKL D 15 02], is back in Galway. Struggling with drink, drugs, and a thrift-store wardrobe, he's still staggering from a welcome-back hangover when he's offered a job. Someone is murdering young tinkers, and the police are refusing to investigate; the head of the tinker clan wants answers. Taylor--also a bookworm and a pop-culture sponge--isn't just an antihero, he's an antidetective who spends far more time committing crimes against his liver than following leads. The supporting cast (including a character from The White Trilogy [BKL F 1 03]) moves the action forward while Taylor gets puking drunk, screws up his relationships, and goes days on end without getting to work. The payoff, for some readers, is Taylor's worldview. He may be a drunken shambles, but his wry humor, regret, and sense of impending mortality--often expressed in lines that are like aphorisms of the doomed--keep readers coming along. Crime solving aside, this is a strong piece of crime writing. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Isis Audio; Unabridged edition (January 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753144824
• ISBN-13: 978-0753144824
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,120,270 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Odd, quirky - and thoroughly enjoyable., June 2, 2004

By 

Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Killing of the Tinkers: A Novel (Jack Taylor) (Hardcover)

This is an odd, but thoroughly enjoyable, novel. Set in Galway, Ireland, Jack Taylor is an alcoholic and cocaine addict, recently bounced from the Guards. He arrives back in Galway, looks up old friends, consumes quantities of booze and coke and is approached by a man who wants him to help solve the murders of several "tinkers," formerly known in less politically correct days as Gypsies.

Taylor's approach to things is, putting it mildly, chaotic. He is given to a love of old rock 'n roll music, has an expectedly odd assortment of friends, makes enemies easily and suffers fierce hangovers.

But he does solve the mystery in the end in an unpredictable way.

Overall, Bruen's writing is wonderfully quirky. Jack Taylor is a well developed character; so well-developed, in fact, that he's not particularly likeable. Most of the other characters are kind of thing, but passable.

The plot . . . well, it isn't a smooth and winding road, that's for sure. But the twists are fun to roll with. A satisfying excursion with an author with a unique approach. If half-stars were a possibility, I'd give it four and a half. Not quite a five, but well worth reading.

Jerry

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Jack Taylor Plumbs the Depths, September 18, 2004

By 

Untouchable (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Killing of the Tinkers (Brandon Originals S.) (Paperback)

At the end of THE GUARDS, the prequel to this book, Jack Taylor leaves Ireland for London. Now he's back, although any sign of a fanfare for his return is sadly missing. I though Ken Bruen took Jack Taylor just about as low as it is possible to take a character in THE GUARDS, but he's managed to follow that dark excursion up by plunging him into an even deeper canyon in THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS.

He's not long back home when he is sought out by a man who needs his help. Of course, Jack is in a pub at the time and has no problem listening to the man, a tinker named Sweeper. He explains that someone has been savagely murdering, occasionally including dismemberment, the young men from his clan. The feelings towards the tinkers (sometimes otherwise known as gypsies) range from dislike to fear and hatred, so the suspect pool could be very large. Sweeper has resorted to turning to Taylor for help because the Garda Siochana (the Irish police force), of which Taylor used to be a member, have not bothered to investigate preferring to write the deaths off as the result of a feud between tinker families.

It's a pretty grim sounding situation and a difficult case, but when the offer of free accommodation is included with a healthy pay packet, jack can't refuse.

Just because he has agreed to take the case, taken the tinker's money and moved into a tinker's house, it doesn't mean he will throw himself into a full-scale investigation. His intentions are honorable, mind you, but the temptations of the many pubs see him succumbing all too often, mixing his alcohol consumption with a steady supply of cocaine.

He makes progress on the case thanks mainly to the help of a policeman friend from London, but there are external factors that also adversely affect his progress. When he isn't being harassed by his ex-colleagues from the Garda, he is being severely beaten by men who despise tinkers or he's being hounded by nuisance suspects. Somehow amongst all of this drama, drug-taking and intrigue, Jack also manages a couple of relationships and accompanying break-ups. Yes, there's certainly a lot going on and emotions are being whipped from high to low.

This is a bleak story filled with noir themes. A sense of hopelessness surrounds Jack who is either unwilling or unable to save himself even while he's trying to help others. The mood isn't improved by the repeated warnings given to us in Jack's narrative that mistakes and oversights he is making will later result in tragedy. Armed with this fact from quite early I was on my guard to trust nothing and nobody, but Bruen was still able to produce an ending that moved me.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Pint and a Black Bush, March 1, 2008

By 

Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Killing of the Tinkers : A Novel (Hardcover)

There is magic in Ken Bruen that is not easily placed. It's certainly not the plot - there is little mystery and less forensics in Bruen's Irish crime staccato. And one can hardly be drawn to the characters, unless in the mildly perverse sense of attraction to tragic heroes plotting self destruction. Nor is Bruen good for your spirits, as he drags the reader through vast fields of human wreckage that begin with mere despair and reach utter wretchedness by the climax. Yet just as Bruen's drug and alcohol addled Jack Taylor is drawn to his booze and coke, I find myself addicted to this sparse and brutal poetry disguised as fiction, not merely unique but untouchable.

"The Killing of the Tinkers" is the second Jack Taylor novel. A classically simple Bruen story line: someone is killing "tinkers" (gypsies), the cops could care less, ex-Guard Taylor is offered a lucrative fee by one of the clan to find out who. But as with most of Bruen's writing, this central plot - finding the killer - is mostly forgotten as the insolent Taylor drifts in and out of all varieties of drug induced stupors and subsequent vomit and hangovers - not a lot of social redeeming value here, and far from the cardboard cutout PIs more often found in crime fiction. Taylor stays sober enough to wreck his short marriage and start a torrid new affair. While some of the tangents and side stories may seem like diversion in a patently sparse Bruen novel, this is indeed key to the Bruen's allure of spinning the complex psychological and cultural backdrop to the story. As always, the well-read author peppers his prose with a wide range of literary quotes and references - how can you argue with a guy comfortable with Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan - adding a dimension that complements the story while contradicting Taylor's surface brutishness. The birth of Taylor's friends child builds from the poignant in "Tinkers" to the heart wrenching in subsequent Taylor novels ("The Dramatist", "Priest"). From confrontation to beatings to decapitated swans and irate mothers, Taylor and Bruen careen to a finish that if not Hitchcockian is certainly surprising, highlighting some clever foreshadowing not typically associated with this author.

In short, modern noir as bleak as it can get, an addiction too intelligent to be called guilty pleasure. If you're not a Ken Bruen fan yet, pick up "The Guards" first and start your own habit.