Booked (and Printed): February 2025

Booked (and Printed) February 2025     February zipped by with a whisper. Valentine’s Day, cold weather, and all. Did I mention it was cold? The temperature peaked a ten or more degrees below freezing every damn day until February 25th (when it smiled with a toasty 32-degrees), and there were more than a few days with subzero lows. March, at least in the weather department, is bound to be better. My reading quantity came out mediocre with five novels and three short stories, and the quality of what I read was uneven. Uneven because two of those tales—a novel and a short story—were…as Toad likes to say, blah. I started the month on a high note with David Housewright’s first Rushmore McKenzie, A HARD TICKET HOME (2004). For the last year I’ve been raiding my library’s impressive McKenzie collection—it has 18 of the 21 titles (so far)—and all of those missing are from the first half of the series, including the debut. So my lovely and thoughtful wife gave me A Hard Ticket Home for Christmas and I waited as long as I could before reading it—which was about a month. It was fun to see how McKenzie evolved in the two decades since his introduction and how much he had stayed the same. Read my detailed review here. Up next was Ken Bruen’s impressive new Jack Taylor, GALWAY’S EDGE (2025). Taylor is a disgraced former Guardia, read that policeman, turned private eye in Galway, Ireland. He lives by his own ethical standards, which are often at odds with those of society. In Galway’s Edge, Jack is hired by The Vatican to look into a vigilante group roaming Galway’s dark corners. Of course everything turns to s—, but Jack takes it all in stride. Read my detailed review here. BAD MOON, by Todd Ritter (2011)—who is better known under his pseudonym Riley Sager—was the dark horse of the month. I pulled this one from the library shelf for no other reason than it had been published by Minotaur Books; see my reasoning why here.  And wow did it fill a reading need I didn’t know I had. Bad Moon leans into the psychological thriller subgenre with its twisty and surprising plot but it does so without the jolts and the “oh come on” plot twists that often dampen the genre. I liked it a bunch and I’m certain I’ll find my way back to Ritter’s writing again. Read my detailed review here. February’s bum read is an old paperback original I’ve been carrying around for two decades, give or take a year or three. Jack D. Hunter’s THE TERROR ALLIANCE (1980) is a cold war spy thriller that began promising enough with a little humor, some action, and a cool take on the late-1970s CIA. It even has some relevance in today’s post-truth MAGA world—only one example is a US president exiting NATO and abandoning Europe. But this tantalizing opening was defeated by an overly complicated plot and a bunch of talk-talk filler that made reading a chore rather than a relief. Which is a shame because I’ve read a handful of Hunter’s thrillers with good results. The last book of February returned me to the same world as the first. THEM BONES, by David Housewright (2025), is the latest entry in the McKenzie series and well… it doesn’t come out until June 24 and so I won’t go into detail now. But rest assured I’ll have a review on the street before it hits the bookstores. My favorite book of the month? It must be Bruen’s Galway’s Edge.

As for short stories, my intake was limited. I read three and of those, two were damn good and the third was odd and ultimately disappointing. The first, Judy Alter’s “SWEET REVENGE” (1994), is a treacherous, and most excellent, tale about an abused woman in the Old West. It highlights the misery many women suffered on the frontier and its open ending is perfectly perfect. I liked it a bunch. I read “Sweet Revenge” in Ed Gorman’s fine anthology The Best of the American West (1998). “HOW I SPEND MY DAYS AND MY NIGHTS,” by Håkan Nesser (2006), is the first of two tales I read from a cool Swedish Crime boxed set I picked up at a library sale—I wrote about the set here. This brilliant crime story has a Hitchcockian flare with an ironic ending that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Read my detailed review here. The other Swedish Crime tale was Arne Dahl’s “MIGRAINE” (2012). This wacky sorta existentialist tale is just good enough to finish, but its weirdness and lack of any action or even an interesting conclusion made it frustrating. Only part of the frustration is when, in the last few paragraphs, the reader realizes the whole exercise is nothing more than an advertisement for Dahl’s novels. It had the same buzz as Ralph’s Little Orphan Annie’s decoder ring, from A Christmas Story, when it spelled out: “Drink More Ovaltine.” Fin— Now on to next month…

Review: "Galway's Edge" by Ken Bruen

 

Galway’s Edge by Ken Bruen Mysterious Press, 2025   Galway’s Edge (scheduled for release Mar. 4) is a wild-eyed and far-ranging crime novel written as only Ken Bruen can: a splash of poetry; a dash of morality, or the absence of morality, perhaps; a pinch of madness; and a dollop of justice. This is the eighteenth book featuring Galway, located on the western shore of Ireland, private eye Jack Taylor. Jack is hired by the rotund Father Richard, a papal troubleshooter from Rome, to clean up a local vigilante group called Edge. Edge is comprised of five of Galway’s leading citizens, including the Church’s own Father Kevin Whelan. Father Richard’s masters in the Vatican are concerned about the potential for bad press if Whelan’s involvement becomes widely known. But before Taylor can do anything about Whelan, the priest is found in his own backyard dangling from a rope. Soon after, another member of Edge is stabbed to death, and it becomes obvious Edge’s leading citizens are being targeted by a multi-millionaire with a grudge against the group. As Taylor investigates Edge and the millionaire, he does side jobs for a nun hoping to retrieve a stolen crucifix, a battered wife looking for breathing room from her husband, and a terminally ill man hoping Jack will kill him. Happily, one or two of the subplots tie-in nicely with Edge, the millionaire, and Father Richard. Galway’s Edge is a sparkling examination of the steaming rot of humanity’s underbelly—a rot that, as you read, you realize affects us all. The tale spans parts of eight months, November 2022 to June 2023, and many of the chapters are introduced with real life events. A cover-up of an Irish cervical cancer test that gave false negatives. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trump’s avoidance of consequences in the United States…and so and so on. These real-world events underscore the absurdity of our shared morality—is it any more or less moral for Taylor to kill a man dying of cancer than it is for a government to wage war, a criminal to be elected as the president of the U.S.? Which gives Galway’s Edge a dour expression, but Bruen’s sly wit rescues it from utter darkness. And while Taylor is a hard man with his own distinct sense of morality, which usually conflicts with society’s expectations, his reasoning is never abstract and always understandable. Galway’s Edge is, as is Ken Bruen, the real deal—interesting, thought-provoking, and in equal parts ugly and redemptive.

Check out Galway’s Edge at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

BLITZ by Ken Bruen

This review originally appeared in an online magazine--I think in the Spring of 2004; maybe 2005--and while my review is luke-warm I really did enjoy the novel. And be warned, this review is a little harsher than the usual fare around here, but when I stumbled across it a few days ago it brought back good memories of not only the novel, but also of the time spent writing the review.

Blitz, written by Edgar nominee Ken Bruen, is a white-hot, dialogue-rich, British noir—Bruen is Irish, so it should probably be classified as Irish noir, but whatever it is, it is most certainly set in southeast London.

Blitz is the story of a serial killer—The Blitz, he calls himself—and London’s finest as they track him. The cast is large and often unpredictable: Detective Sergeant Brant, a brutal, belligerent cop accused of assault; Detective Sergeant Porter Nash, a recent transfer into the squad, and openly homosexual; Chief Inspector Roberts, who finds respite in wine after his wife’s death; Police Constable Falls, a black female cop with a liking for nose candy and a skinhead called Metal for a pal; Police Constable McDonald, a young cop with an eye at the top job. The cast creates a mix of tension and humor. They play off each other like pin-balls in a machine—seemingly never playing, acting, or responding as expected.

The prose is quick, sharp and intense. The novel is written with a haphazard storyline. The chapters are quick hits of story—each written from the perspective of a major player: Blitz, Brant, Nash, Roberts, etc. They seem to meander, almost stall a few times, but Bruen pulls the story along with a gritty, yet humorous prose. The bad guy—The Blitz—is somewhat shallow and two dimensional. The good guys aren’t that good, and they seem to do less police work and more battle against personal demons. The novel is a composite of its characters. They are more important than the plot. They define the story—humanity interacting with humanity; the good, the bad, and all the varying shades in the middle.

Blitz is not the best modern noir has to offer, but it is entertaining. The prose is rough and hot—it has the uneven feel of a blues song. The characters are raw, both disgusting and hilarious in the same paragraph, even sentence. The words pulse with energy. They drive the story forward with a fresh and unexpected beat, but it burns a little too long before it climaxes into an amusing, if mildly unsatisfying, ending.