The fourth in the Jack Taylor series, this is less about the case at hand than about Jack himself. It’s as if Yeats’ menacing beast, while Jack turns in a ”widening gyre” of ”The Second Coming” (if I remember it correctly) approaches with an unwavering course Jack is helpless to avoid.
Jack is clear-eyed and sober, and, if not signing happy songs in the street, he seems reasonably content at times. Unresolved problems and annoyances drift in and out of view and prey on his mind: his tense relationship with his horrid mother and her failing health; his strained friendships with Cathy, who has assisted him with research in the past, and her husband Jeff, the barman who has become his best friend; the swan boy from The Killing of the Tinkers; and his love for Ann Henderson, recently married to a brutal guard who figures prominently in the story. There are new things, too: a vigilante group called the Pikemen; a new relationship with a strong and interesting woman named Margaret; new living arrangements at the old-fashioned Bailey’s Hotel, which come with warm friendships with Mrs. Bailey, the eighty-something-year-old owner, and with Janet, her equally ancient cleaner; and an unwelcome request from Jack’s former drug dealer to look into the death of his sister, labeled a “death by misadventure” by the guards. Because a volume of Synge’s Complete Plays and Poems, including Playboy of the Western World, was found under her body, Jack finds it likely something more was involved. It becomes clear after another girl meets a similar fate with a copy of Playboy, a passage highlighted, found under her body as well.
The title character and the case of these mysterious deaths is important but hardly central to the novel; weeks go by when Jack does nothing about this case. It is Jack’s life, his viewpoint, that holds the narrative together, and Bruen brings us Jack’s life with great economy and poetry. Jack’s is a riveting story.
