4.0
Taming the Alien
By Ken BruenPublisher Description
Cops Roberts and Brant come back swinging in book two of the “hip, violent and funny” crime novel trilogy set on “the mean streets of southeast London” (Publishers Weekly).
South London’s Chief Inspector Roberts and his partner, the reckless and thuggish Irish Detective Sergeant Brant, are at odds with who has it worse: Roberts, with a mortgage in Dulwich, a pregnant daughter in boarding school, and a dire medical diagnosis; or Brant, relegated to desk duty after getting knifed in the back, and living to see his complete Ed McBain collection destroyed by a psycho with a baseball bat. That particular nut job has been dubbed the Alien, a hit man so named for carrying out a skull-smashing job while watching Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, and hanging around in the spatter to finish the film.
But this time the carnage isn’t confined to southeast London. As Brant heads to New York by way of Dublin to catch the couple who knifed him and the Alien goes to San Francisco to pay a surprise visit to his former girlfriend, Bruen’s broad, brutal canvas once again shows why he’s been hailed as one of “the most original and innovative noir voices of the last two decades” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
South London’s Chief Inspector Roberts and his partner, the reckless and thuggish Irish Detective Sergeant Brant, are at odds with who has it worse: Roberts, with a mortgage in Dulwich, a pregnant daughter in boarding school, and a dire medical diagnosis; or Brant, relegated to desk duty after getting knifed in the back, and living to see his complete Ed McBain collection destroyed by a psycho with a baseball bat. That particular nut job has been dubbed the Alien, a hit man so named for carrying out a skull-smashing job while watching Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, and hanging around in the spatter to finish the film.
But this time the carnage isn’t confined to southeast London. As Brant heads to New York by way of Dublin to catch the couple who knifed him and the Alien goes to San Francisco to pay a surprise visit to his former girlfriend, Bruen’s broad, brutal canvas once again shows why he’s been hailed as one of “the most original and innovative noir voices of the last two decades” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
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About Ken Bruen
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 prosperous 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. Bruen continues to live and work in Galway.
Other books by Ken Bruen
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