Ken Bruen-Jack Taylor Series

My upload speed is slow but this series is so very much worth the patience.


Ken Bruen [b.1951] is one of the most prominent Irish crime writers of the last two decades. Born in Galway, he spent twenty-five years traveling the world before he began writing in the mid 1990s. As an English teacher, Bruen worked in South Africa, Japan, and South America, where he once spent a short time in a Brazilian jail. He has two long-running series: one starring a disgraced former policeman named Jack Taylor, the other a London police detective named Inspector Brant.

Praised for their sharp insight into the darker side of today's propserous Ireland, Bruen's novels are marked by grim atmosphere and clipped prose. Among the best known are his White Trilogy (1998-2000) and The Guards (2001), the Shamus award-winning first novel in the Jack Taylor series. Along with his wife and daughter, Bruen continues to live and work in Galway.

The Jack Taylor Series by Ken Bruen all read by Gerry O'Brien
Mono at 64kbps all CD Quality except 5 & 7 Cassettes
These books are shorter than the usual, at around 4 to 5 hrs in length, however you can see from the comments below that doesn't mean they are any less a great read. Comments
"Why the hell haven't I heard of Ken Bruen before? He's a terrific writer and The Guards is one of the most mesmerizing works of crime fiction I've ever read... This guy is the real thing."
James W Hall
"The Guards blew me away. It's dark, funny and moving - just for starters. With a sharp eye and a lyrical voice, Ken Bruen takes us on a powerful odyssey through the mean streets of Galway, straight into the Irish heart. Bruen's tale is a potent draft of desire and hopelessness, conviction and surrender, inadvertent heroism and unexpected grace. This is mystery writing of a high order."
T Jefferson Parker
1---The Guards (2001)
Length:- 4hrs 38mins
Awards
Edgar Awards (nominee) Shamus Awards Macavity Awards (nominee)
Jack Taylor is a disgraced ex-cop in Galway. Mourning the death of his father, he is slowly drinking to oblivion. He has an ability to "find things" and is asked to investigate a teenage suicide. This leads him into a dangerous confrontation with a powerful businessman. A darker conspiracy slowly unfolds. Aided by a punk girl, he fumbles towards a lethal solution. The narrative is fueled by black humour, stark violence and moments of radiance.
The Guards remain as a chorus in the background, never altogether past, infringing on Jack Taylor at the least expected moment. The intimate, bustling city of Galway, crashing into prosperity, illuminates the story at every turn.
2--The Killing of the Tinkers (2002)
Length:- 4hrs 28mins
Awards Macavity Award Anthony Awards (nominee s)
Jack Taylor, A disgraced ex-cop in Galway, has slid further down the slope of despair. After a year in London he returns to his home town of Galway with a leather coat and a coke habit. Someone is systematically slaughtering young travellers and dumping their bodies in the city centre. Even in the state he's in, Jack Taylor has an uncanny ability to know where to look, what questions to ask, and with the aid of an English policeman, apparently solves the case. Now he stands poised on the precipice of the most devastating decision of his career, while at the same time a rare opportunity of real and enduring love also materialises. As with The Guards, the city of Galway dances, jeers, consoles, threatens, entices, near kills and yet continues to be the ultimate ground of Jack Taylor's transcendence, all he understands of heaven and hell.
3--The Magdalen Martyrs (2003)
Length:- 5hrs 33min
Jack Taylor, traumatised, bitter and hurting from his last case, has resolved to give up the finding business. However, he owes the local hard man a debt of honour and it appears easy enough: find "the Angel of the Magdalen" - a woman who helped the unfortunates incarcerated in the infamous laundry.
He is also hired by a whizz kid to prove that his father's death was no accident. Jack treats both cases as relatively simple affairs. He becomes involved with a woman who might literally be the death of him, runs dangerously foul of the cops and unearths a story that will drag his sanity to its limits. A policewoman who tests his tolerance may hold the key to both cases, and if he can suppress his contempt for her he may survive. He is finally clean and sober but the unfolding events will not only shake his sobriety but bring him as close to death as he could ever have imagined. As in The Guards and The Killing of the Tinkers, the City of Galway berates, cajoles, torments and enchants him at every confused step he takes. He is about to discover the true meaning of martyrdom, and the awful legacy of suicide will finally be bequeathed to him.
4--The Dramatist (2004)
Length:- 4hrs 24
Awards Shamus Awards
The impossible has happened: Jack Taylor is living clean and dating a mature woman. Rumour suggests he is even attending mass... The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that "The Dramatist", a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns Jack's refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he's maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss.

5--Priest (2006)
Length:-6hrs 16
Awards Edgar Awards (nominee)
Set in Galway, Ireland, a dark controversial novel by a crime-writing star.Jack Taylor has always believed himself to be beyond salvation.Still struggling with his drink problem and trying to get his life on course following personal loss he is given as unusual assignment.
Taylor is a detective partly in the mould of Scotland's finest (Laidlaw, Rebus) and partly in tune with other anti-heroes such as Wallander and Robercheax. What makes him original is the dark set setting combined with the unsuspecting attitude to social issues. The Church has long had a dominant influence in Irish life and here the dark side is explored. . .
6--Cross (2007)
Length:- 5hrs 24min
Cross (kros/ noun, verb, & adjective) means an ancient instrument of torture, or, in a very bad humour, or, a punch thrown across an opponent's punch. Jack Taylor brings death and pain to everyone he loves. His only hope of redemption - his surrogate son, Cody - is lying in hospital in a coma. At least he still has Ridge, his old friend from the Guards, though theirs is an unorthodox relationship. When she tells him that a boy has been crucified in Galway city, he agrees to help her search for the killer. Jack's investigations take him to many of his old haunts where he encounters ghosts, dead and living. Everyone wants something from him, but Jack is not sure he has anything left to give. Maybe he should sell up, pocket his Euros and get the hell out of Galway like everyone else seems to be doing. Then the sister of the murdered boy is burned to death, and Jack decides he must hunt down the killer, if only to administer his own brand of rough justice.
7--Sanctuary (2008)
Length:- 3hrs 21min
Two guards, One nun, One judge. When a letter containing a list of victims arrives in the post, PI Jack Taylor is sickened, but tells himself the list has nothing to do with him. He has enough to do just staying sane. His close friend Ridge is recovering from surgery, and alcohol's siren song is calling to him ever more insistently. A guard and then a judge die in mysterious circumstances. But it is not until a child is added to the list that Taylor determines to find the identity of the killer, and stop them at any cost. What he doesn't know is that his relationship with the killer is far closer than he thinks. And that it's about to become deeply personal. Spiked with dark humor, seasoned with acute insights about the perils of urbanization, and fueled by rage at man's inhumanity to man, this is crime-writing at its darkest and most original.
8--The Devil (2010)
Length:- 4hrs 13mins
America - the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: but not for PI Jack Taylor, who's just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an over-friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that this stranger seems to know rather more than he should about Jack. Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway. But when he's called to investigate a student murder - connected to an elusive Mr K - he remembers the man from the airport. Is the stranger really is who he says he is? With the help of the Jameson, Jack struggles to make sense of it all. After several more murders and too many coincidental encounters, Jack believes he may have met his nemesis. But why has he been chosen? And could he really have taken on the devil himself?
9--Headstone (2011)
Length:- 4hrs 53mins
Some people help the less fortunate. Others kill them. Welcome to Headstone - Jack Taylor's darkest nightmare.
An elderly priest is viciously beaten until nearly dead. A special needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises. Jack Taylor has encountered most of them but nothing before has ever truly terrified him until a group called Headstone rears its ugly head. A series of seemingly random, insane, violent events has even the national police, the Guards, shaken.
Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this coterie of evil intends to act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack's life as an act of appalling violence alerts him to the horror enveloping Galway.
Accepting the power of Headstone, Jack realizes that in order to fight back he must relinquish the remaining shreds of what has made him human--knowledge that may have come too late to prevent an act of such ferocious evil that the whole country would be changed forever--and in the worst way.
With awful clarity, Jack knows that not only might he be powerless to stop it but that he may not have the grit needed to even face it.