Customer Reviews

Sanctuary

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First Sentence: Dear Mr. Taylor, Please forgive the formality.

Jack Taylor has sold his apartment and is ready to head to the US when his friend, Ridge, announces she has malignant breast cancer, so he stays to help her. He then receives the letter stating two guards, one nun, one judge and a child will die and he is to be witness.

His once friend, now enemy, Guarda Superintendent Clancy, doesn't give it any credence, but Jack does follows up, with the help of now-recovered Ridge and other friends.

I begin each new Bruen book afraid the quality won't be has high as the last. I had nothing to fear.

Bruen is not for everyone: Jack is a character you don't necessarily like, but about whom you do care. The story is hard-edged, violent and emotional. The alternating voices of conversational first person and chilling third person is extremely effective.

Bruen's descriptions of the city, observations on the changes prosperity have wrought on Galway, as well as dark humor and sensitivity make him a remarkable writer. The story and writing are spare, brutal, physically and emotionally harsh, tragic and brilliant.

After his move to America is derailed by Ridge's illness, a sober Jack Taylor is pulled back into the investigation game when a religious psycho gives him (and only him) the clues necessary to prevent her murder of a child.

This may be my favorite Jack Taylor book yet. The plot is compelling and the pacing is almost thriller-like. There is also a revelation regarding an major event from one of the previous books. As usual, Bruen's sparse prose is full of humor so dry you'd miss it if you weren't paying attention. My only complaint is that despite a visit to his bookseller, this installment offered no new reading recommendations for me.

I really enjoyed Sanctuary. Like most of the Jack Taylor series, it flies by. The prose is sparse, well constructed, and frequently ironic or sarcastic in the extreme. Bruen's very fond of delivering trenchant observations about what is happening to his beloved Galway. He gets off some of his very best observations of the series in Sanctuary.

Another reader has commented that he did not do anything quite so new here in this book as he has in a few others. I'd agree, but he also interjects an element into the series's storyline that is pretty important for future books in the series.

Bruen's quite the fan of the "...nasty, brutish, and short" school of thought on human life. However, the central motif of the whole series is his nearly inchoate rage at how badly humans can treat other humans (and themselves.) Bruen's humanity is in fine shape and this is quite a worthwhile addition to the Jack Taylor canon.

Although former Irish Garda Siochana guard Jack Taylor drinks in America when he falls off the wagon, he is back in Galway because his police partner Cathleen Ridge has breast cancer. She is about the only person he gives a sh*t about.

Someone calling himself Benedictus sends Jack a note with a hit list of planned victims that includes two guards, a judge, a nun and one child. He has no idea who this person is and why he or she is sending him the list. Jack discusses the note with his former friend and current enemy Superintendent Clancy, who says though one person included on the list is dead in a hit and run, he writes off Taylor's serial killer theory as nonsense. Jack still wonders why the killer thought he would understand as he comprehends nothing.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, Jack knows it is easy to stop drinking; he has done it a thousand times. The story line is fast-paced though the ending feels rushed and the hero is a bit "Xanaxed" down than his normal level of belligerency. Still fans of the series will appreciate this tale because we know Jack.

Harriet Klausner

I have long admired Bruen's writing but Sanctuary, at 200 pages of large type reads like a series of Bruen's best moments held together with an astonishingly spare plot. Drunk, detecting, drunk, fighting, drunk, philosophizing, then sober again. It's like Bruen doing a precis of Bruen. Not sure why he wrote this as it doesn't break new ground. But it's as pleasant to read (in an hour and a half) as listening to any old musical favorites you might want to. If you have the bucks to spare, why not.

When Ken Bruen writes a Jack Taylor story, it's a must read for me. Never thought I'd relate to an investigator over in Ireland, but Jack Taylor isn't just an investigator. He's a flawed, emotionally complex, driven, political creature who gets under your skin. None of the Jack Taylor books have disappointed me, Sanctuary included. Gave it 5 stars.

If you're still looking for a swift kick out of that vanilla pop crime rut filled with plastic characters and pedestrian prose, you haven't met Ken Bruen. Like his brawling bare knuckled protagonists, Bruen is unconventional, unadorned and incorrigible. He hacks out his blunt prose with a chain saw - raw, jarring, jagged. The Celtic Charles Butkowski.

"Sanctuary" is a blistering example of Bruen's craft. Ex-Guard Jack Taylor is back, his planned exodus to America waylaid by the breast cancer of his sometimes friend and all times adversary, Ridge of the female Guard, the Irish Ni Iomaire. Taylor receives an ominous letter promising the slaughter of two guards, a judge, a nun, and a child, signed by "Benedictus.". The first Guard has already died when Taylor stops in to see Galway police superintendent Clancy, a ferocious thug and former partner of Taylor when young beat cops. Though much alike excepting social position, Clancy has a visceral hate for the alcoholic and shiftless Taylor. Clancy dismisses both Taylor and the letter, continuing denial even as "accidents" continue to take the lives of named victims. Filling out the color in the brutal score are a gaggle of Taylor regulars - the nicotine-stained Father Malachy, onetime drug dealer and Zen master Stewart, and Jeff and Kathy, parents of the child who died under Taylor's watch - the core of the guilt that jarred Taylor's life from bent rails to a major train wreck. A neat twist in that old story adds another dimension of angst to a series that had already plumbed the lowest rings of Hell.

As always, Bruen leans on blunt prose and gritty chacters more than plots, mystery, or suspense. No exception here, and certainly no forensics, science, or real police work. Taylor is an accidental investigator at best, better at breaking legs than cracking cases. "Sanctuary" is a short and sweet lesson in anguish and pain that is not without nobility - in Bruen's twisted way - a drak ride of salvation that should not be missed.

Jack Taylor is sober. That's worth mentioning because it doesn't happen very often, nor last very long. He was on his way to the airport, getting ready to leave Ireland, but his friend Ridge was diagnosed with breast cancer, so he stayed. He might live to regret that when he gets a letter from someone. It's a list: 'Two guards, one nun, one judge. And, alas, one child.' And it seems they're all going to die. Spare prose, dark humour. My addiction to Bruen is like Jack's addiction to the bottle. Only I'm never giving up.

In my opinion, this may be the best Jack Taylor novel in this uniformly excellent series. It is rather short (about 200 pages) but it packs a whole lot of action and interesting dialogue on almost every page.

Once again Jack is besieged by all his old devils: booze, drugs and general malaise. The weather, of course, is always around to add more depression to the plot, and the murders are typically gruesome. Once again a child is involved, and Jack and some of the characters from the previous novels are together again.

One can only feel sorry for Jack, despite his obvious weaknesses. No sooner does an old tragedy get lifted from his shoulders than another problem begins to drag him down. Deep down, howeve, he is an extremely decent and (dare I say) kindly man, and one who is easy to root for when it comes to straightening out his troubled and tangled life.

I hope very much that we have not heard the last from this man and his life and surroundings.

Ken Bruen set, for me, an amazingly high standard with his Guards. London Blvd, and Tinkers. A person at the bottom ladder of society, dependent on drugs and alcohol, still lifted himself up in selfless service to outcasts, friends, and to Galway. All the while he reveled in things Irish.
In Sanctuary, Jack Taylor sits around staring at alcohol, downing drugs, and bemoaning his fate, while somebody else is twice sent to do the actual sleuthing. He is a place marker in a plot that barely needs him. Moreover the writing, that writing that once amazed and astonished, barely flickers this time. Santuary looks like little more than an excuse to move Taylor to New York. A pity, too, because Bruen can be so wonderful.