24 September 2026.
ISBN: 978-1-035924066 (HB)
In one sense it is sad to be reviewing this novel, as Ken Bruen died last year and ‘Galway’s Edge’ is the last of his 20 stories featuring Jack Taylor. In another it is a perverse pleasure to be savouring again Bruen’s vivid and violent world in the west of Ireland.
Edge is a group of powerful figures
in Galway which aims to rid the city of criminals and abusers. The Vatican,
which considers Edge to be anti-Catholic, is not pleased when it discovers that
a priest, Father Whelan, has joined it. Father Richard, special envoy to the
Archdiocese of Galway, Tuam, and Athenry, is sent by a
foul-mouthed monsignor to request (a polite description) Taylor to speak to
Whelan and dissuade him from membership. Father Richard is corpulent,
hard-drinking and equally hard-eating (the pope had once referred to him as ‘an
ecclesiastical barracuda’). Taylor, ex-garda and equally hard drinking, agrees
to speak to Whelan. The day after he does so, Whelan is found hanged. This
raises at least two questions: would Edge murder one of its own? Or, if not,
who would be sufficiently courageous to take such a swipe at the organisation?
Before long another member of Edge is brutally murdered, stabbed 50 times.
As with its predecessor ‘Galway Confidential’, a convent is involved. Taylor is asked to investigate the disappearance of a valued crucifix. Via his criminal contacts, Taylor discovers what has happened to it and organises its recovery from the office of an unscrupulous businessman who surrounds himself with heavies. Although it ends well for the nuns, it doesn’t end well for the career burglar who recovers it and precipitates Taylor into more trouble. He is already tangling with a violent garda who is beating his wife. He is also asked to discredit suggestions of child abuse against another priest.
An exchange gives a good idea of the world Taylor inhabits. ‘Don’t you have, like, any regular friends, I mean ordinary folk? Does everyone in your battered universe have a story?’ a friend asks, to which the response is ‘There’s a neon sign above my head that welcomes the weird and marginalised.’ Taylor inhabits a violent world and certainly mixes with low life, but there is an underlying sense of decency about everything he does (he won’t, for instance, drink Jameson’s whiskey as it is being exported to Russia!), as there is with most of his criminal friends. Persons who have no essential decency receive their comeuppance.
As with Bruen’s previous novels, the action is punctuated by contemporary news (Trump and Putin, for example), often of a dispiriting nature. ‘What happened to our country?’ Taylor asks at one point. Bon mots from other writers appear between chapters.
Bruen’s style is notoriously
sparse. Were there an award for the fewest words on the page of a crime novel,
he would win it hands down. He would win another award for the shortest
sentences. Sometimes they’re not even sentences. He doesn’t really go in for
descriptions of persons or place. It’s all in the dialogue or extremely pithy
observations, and from these the reader enters another world. One begins to
wonder why other novelists bother with their often-wordy descriptions. The
answer is that they wouldn’t do the pared back style as convincingly as Bruen.
The crime world has lost a truly individual voice. It is fortunate indeed that
he has left us so many novels (there are many more than just the Taylor
series). My introduction to Bruen was ‘Galway Confidential’. I hope to read the
other 18 novels in the series and, if you haven’t already done so, I encourage
you to do the same.
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Reviewer: David Whittle
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