Priest: A Novel (Jack Taylor Series) (Hardcover)

by Ken Bruen (Author) "What I remember most about the mental hospital The madhouse The loony bin The home for the bewildered is a black man may have saved..." (more)
Key Phrases: drinking school, Father Joyce, Michael Clare, Jack Taylor (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Recovered from incapacitating guilt over the death of a child on his watch, Jack Taylor is released from the loony bin at the start of Shamus-winner Bruen's searing fifth book about the alcoholic Galwegian ex-cop (after 2006's The Dramatist). Jack's friend Nio "Ridge" Iomaire picks him up from the hospital and mentions the gory headlines: a pedophilic priest, Father Joyce, was beheaded. At the request of another frightened priest, Jack launches an unofficial investigation with the assistance of an eager, younger partner, Cody. All the while fighting his constant ache for a drink, the maverick PI also helps Ridge ward off a stalker. Jack is a keen and literary narrator, and Bruen's latest Irish noir makes for a kind of savage poetry, at once exhausting and exhilarating. Bruen has been a finalist for Edgar, Anthony and Barry awards. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
Jack Taylor has spent the last five months in the loony bin, recovering from the horrific tragedy at the end of The Dramatist (2006). Maybe it's his new frame of mind--most of his friends are dead or have become his enemies--or maybe it's something else, but Ireland seems to have become even more foreign to the cranky ex-Guard in that short time. His head is clanging with thoughts about the increasingly commodified Irish soul as he finds himself, barely prepared, sucked into three new cases: finding out who beheaded a child-molesting priest; catching his last remaining friend's stalker; and locating his missing ex-best friend--the father of the girl who died while Taylor was babysitting her has disappeared into skid row. Dark days, even for Taylor, though he still finds time for ruminations on literature, music, and pop culture. If you like this cup of tea, it's brewed about the same as the last one. But Bruen, a writer of talent and originality, has yet to push himself to the next level. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312341407
• ISBN-13: 978-0312341404
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #515,588 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This is item 5 in The Jack Taylor Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unconsecrated Ground, May 14, 2007

By	Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Not that further proof was needed, but "Priest", Ken Bruen's latest apologies-be-damned journey into Hell, is additional evidence that if he is not the most talented writer of crime fiction today, he is certainly the most uninhibited. Not unlike Bruen's paradoxical hero Jack Taylor, who is as comfortable reading classic fiction in the library as he is bashing in an adversary's head with a hurley stick, Bruen's jagged, stripped down Irish prose, rendered with a chainsaw, contradicts its poetic appeal. Indeed, Ireland's classic warrior poets have been reinvented in Ken Bruen and the tragic, down-on-their-luck heroes that fill his pages.

This time around, Taylor is being released from a psychiatric hospital, three years of his life lost, racked in guilt by the death of a child under his care. When a priest in Galway has been decapitated, Taylor's old nemesis, the nicotine-stained Father Malachy, swallows some pride - just barely - and enlists Taylor's help. What follows is a painfully graphic tale of pederasty in the Catholic Church, a gut-ripping expose covering tainted ground where few writers dare to tread. But despite the reprehensible central theme, life actually begins to start looking up for recovering alcoholic Taylor. Mrs. Bailey, his beloved landlady, has passed away during his incarceration, leaving to Jack an apartment and small inheritance. His always-combatant relationship with "Ridge", the lesbian cop of Ireland's Ban Guarda, shows signs of softening. And then Cody, a young investigator wannabe who's been admiring Jack from afar and drops into his life and, to Jack's initial dismay, is soon more of a son than a partner. Almost enough for long time readers to fear that loaner Jack is thinking about settling down, raising a family, and trading in his hurley for knitting needles.

But soon any illusions of this unlikely honeymoon are over, and Bruen jerks the reader so abruptly back into the voids of Irish melancholy and irony that even "The Dramatist", the Bruen noir-fest that put Taylor into the loony bin in the first place, reads like a day in the amusement park. Yet through the despair and ugly twists, Bruen manages to keep the pages turning with his beautifully twisted dialogue and lyrics and his unique talent for encapsulating Ireland's melancholy in a miserly sparse allotment of words. Dark and disturbing, "Priest" has that irrespirable appeal that draws moths to flame. Don't miss it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Into the heart of moral darkness, Galway city, April 25, 2007

By	John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Ken Bruen's plots aren't why I read his Jack Taylor series. It's rather the atmosphere that Bruen has, over the Jack Taylor series, created memorably. The plot, as before, is not all that surprising, even for me. And the "Galway noir" installments are the only mysteries I read right upon their publication.

At this stage, the fifth book on, many familiar elements: ex-Garda Jack struggles not to go back to the bottle. Old friends die or despise him. He has fallen away from his brief bout of seeking inspiration in his faith, and Fr Malachy, more nicotine ravaged than ever, shows up needing Jack's assistance in solving the decapitation of a pedophile priest, apparently at the hands of one of his victims, decades later. This is the main plot. Jack also seeks out forgiveness from the parents of Serena May, Cathy and Jeff, whose family's tragic story featured in the previous book, 'The Dramatist'.

A secondary thread follows Jack's former colleague from the Guards, Ban Gharda Ní Iomaire, or Ridge as Jack insists on anglicizing her surname, as she is stalked. Cody, a young man who wants Jack to employ him as his fellow investigator into the stalking, predictably complicates Jack's efforts to get his life on track and deal with the sudden good fortune of choosing from three places to live in rapidly yuppified, gentrified, and stratified Galway city. He still buys his clothes, always with the price included by Bruen (!) from the charity shop Age Concern...an appropriate name for Jack as he battles with his fragile condition in his fifth decade of struggle physical and personal.

This aspect provides for me the most poignant part of the book. With each chapter preceded by a mordant excerpt from Blaise Pascal's "Pensees," the existential despair Jack fights against darkens. The Church has lost its power, its priests are suspected upon their appearance in public amidst youths, and as the narrator wonders at one point as he finds a small lane near Eyre Square converted to plush townhouses, he wants to shake a Euro-rich jerk (he uses another noun) by his Armani tie. 'You know what happened to the people there?' Jack's surrounded by Irish wanting to ape British accents and American slang. Bruen captures with bitter accuracy the growing loss of an Irish cultural identity as wealth widens the gap in Galway and the organic if much poorer community that he (and his protagonist) grew up within shatters.

Those in charge of Galway city care little, with nearly no exceptions in these pages, for the past of their historic and scenic city. Cranes, construction, and always more euros obliterate. Onslaughts of luxury flats within and second homes outside the city show how tenuous are the claims to tourists that this city takes pride in its cultural heritage. Investors call the shots in more ways than one. Those who knew Jack once are themselves dying off. Those who replace them may be from across the globe. In this flux, Jack roams adrift. Many celebrate the revival of the city, but Bruen, through Jack, mourns the loss of community. It's rarer to find a native now, in real-life as Bruen knows or in fiction for Jack, there.

Here's a scene that sums it up. Jack passes where as a boy he had been hoisted on his da's shoulders to see JFK in his motorcade in 1963 pass that central gathering place in the city. Now, winos haunt it. "Renovations were in full swing. The trees were gone, like civility, and workmen were already digging up the park, driving jackhammers into the green fresh soil. There's some deep metaphor there but it's too sad to draw." (170)

Jack engages with his own literary forebears, and in one instance that seems appended to rather than part of the main story (this assembly of his elements has always intrigued me in Bruen but it does frustrate me as a critic wanting to see more polish in crafting these narratives) Jack considers the weird life of a real-life writer, David Goodis. Thomas Merton does not ease Jack's pain now. Books line his shelves but in this volume Jack reads much less. Bruen likes to integrate presumably some of his own favorite singers and writers into Jack's life. This can also be rather clumsy at times as you wait for a payoff that never comes. Although the popular musical choices in this tale that takes place in 2004 are as usual up to date and reflect by their lyrics as heard by Jack his reactions to his never-peaceful condition. Jack, like his creator, reacts always against the type of yarn we expect.

I admit that the crimes often seem far less intriguing than their investigator. Perhaps Bruen likes playing with our expectations of what a gumshoe's supposed to act like. As Jack tells us: "I've read tons of crime fiction. I'm especially fond of the private-eye stuff. All alcoholics are doomed romantics and the notion of the doomed outsider pitting against the odds, it's like the line from the movie, 'You gotta love him.'" (156) We do love Jack, as he again battles the forces of hate inside his soul and around his rapidly changing and steadily dehumanizing trendy and hip city.

(A version of this review will appear in the Belfast on-line project The Blanket.)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The murder of a priest brings up a painful past, May 29, 2007

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Jack Taylor has recently emerged from the asylum, after his friends' daughter died while under his watch. Still clinging to Item 8234, his symbol of defiance from a wrecked career as an Irish policeman, he rejoins life in his hometown.

Jack has good intentions --- he really does --- but his bad attitude keeps getting in the way. Fortunately, he doesn't always say what he thinks. Not always, just often. Too often, probably. Sometimes, though, his first thought is what he should go with. He just doesn't. If you can say nothing else about him, you have to admit that Jack is honest. Still his own worst enemy, he also has a few others pursuing him in PRIEST, although he is making strides --- slow, short strides --- toward improving his life.

A few good things happen to him, although mostly in the midst of several bad things. Still a bit disoriented from his stay in the "madhouse," he barely has time to ponder his next move when Ban Garda Ridge --- with whom he has a frustrating and tenuous friendship --- mentions the dead priest, Father Joyce. Not wanting to hear the details, he nonetheless does. It is not a pretty story.

"Especially in the current climate...you hear about priests now, it ain't going to be good, it's not going to be a heart-warming tale about some poor dedicated soul who spent fifty years among some remote tribe and then they ate him. No, it's going to be bad, and scandalous."

Of course, it was bad and scandalous. The victim, if we can call him that, was one of the priests who amused himself with altar boys. Those altar boys did not grow up happy and well adjusted. Their lives were shattered, and what little success they achieved in the world came at great cost. Did one of them snap after all these years, or did the priest have other enemies? Jack looks into it initially because he is asked to, but eventually he finds that he can't leave it be, even when some rogue Garda types attempt to warn him off.

While trying to find his way in post-loonybin Galway, an eager young lad named Cody hooks up with Jack, following Jack like a stray puppy. He says he wants to be partners and has always admired Jack, his role model. Jack indulges Cody as a gunslinger indulges a kid with a peashooter. Cody amuses, and even flatters, Jack, who surprises himself by liking the fellow.

Well, things start to go pretty well for Jack, but you know that can't last. And it doesn't. How he's going to pull himself out of the depths of despair after this latest disaster is anybody's guess, but my money is on Ken Bruen to bring Jack back for yet another case. At least, I sure hope he does. The Jack Taylor novels must have a cult following by now.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers