A portrait of the PI from the Shamus Award winner who created him: "They don't come much tougher than Ken Bruen's Irish roughneck, Jack Taylor." --The New York Times Book Review In this short work, Edgar Award finalist Ken Bruen--"a Celtic Dashiell Hammett"--takes us deeper into his character Jack Taylor, formerly of Ireland's police force, the Garda Síochána, now a living-on-the-edge private detective (The Philadelphia Inquirer). "Jack, as ja series know all too well, has a gift for blarney, for plain speaking, for poetic melancholy, for downing shots of Jameson's [sic] without ice, and for pregnant one-word paragraphs." --Kirkus Reviews "Bruen's storytelling style, a stream-of-consciousness mix of prose and verse, strips away Galway's tourist-board facade and offers a darkly comic social commentary." --Booklist "The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel." --The Irish Times  "[Taylor's] voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful." --The Seattle Times