Ken Bruen

Author Information
Ken Bruen's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    41 Books (3 Series)
  • First Book:
    June 1997
  • Latest Book:
    March 2025
  • Author Rating:
  • Share:

Full Series List in Order

Inspector Brant

Ammunition (Sep-2000)
Blitz: Or Brant Hits the Blues (Jun-2003)
Vixen (Aug-2005)
Calibre (Jul-2006)

A Jack Taylor Novel

1 - The Guards (Jan-2003)
2 - The Killing of the Tinkers (Jan-2004)
3 - The Magdalen Martyrs (Mar-2005)
4 - The Dramatist (Mar-2006)
5 - Priest (Mar-2007)
6 - Cross (Mar-2008)
7 - Sanctuary (Sep-2008)
8 - The Devil (Sep-2010)
9 - Headstone (Oct-2011)
10 - C 33 (Nov-2013)
11 - Green Hell (Jul-2015)
12 - The Emerald Lie (Sep-2016)
13 - The Ghosts of Galway (Nov-2017)
14 - In the Galway Silence (Nov-2018)
15 - Galway Girl (Nov-2019)
16 - A Galway Epiphany (Nov-2020)

The White Trilogy

1 - A White Arrest (May-1999)
2 - Taming the Alien (Feb-2000)
3 - The McDead (Apr-2001)

Multi-Author Series List

Bibliomysteries

1 - The Book of Virtue (Nov-2012)

Book List in Order: 41 titles

  • Rilke on Black

    “The most startlingly original crime novel to emerge this decade.” -- GQ

    “The reading equivalent of a boxer’s sharp jab to the solar plexus. It’s fast-paced, tough and pretty sexy.” -- Pulp

    In south London, an unlikely gang...

  • Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice

    The author of Blitz and the Jack Taylor novels delivers a “fast-paced, tough and explosive” tale of a killer couple (The Irish Times).   Cooper likes Ed McBain novels, action movies, and robbing banks. Released from prison, he’...

  • A White Arrest

    The White Trilogy - 1

    A pair of rough cops hunts for a career-making arrest in this first novel of the “hip, violent and funny” trilogy set in Southeast London (Publishers Weekly).   After four decades at the precinct, and close to forcible retirement, al...

  • Taming the Alien

    The White Trilogy - 2

    Detective Sergeant Brant and his boss, Inspector Roberts, are known as the 'R&B' of the Metropolitan Police - and they're as sleazy and ruthless as the villains they are out to catch.Taming the Alien is the second book in Ken Bruen's groundbreaking '...

  • Ammunition

    Inspector Brant

    Over the many years that Inspector Brant has been bringing his own patented brand of policing to the streets of southeast London, the brilliant but tough cop has made a few enemies. So when a crazed gunman, hired by persons unknown, pumps a magazine ...

  • The McDead

    The White Trilogy - 3

    Chief Inspector Roberts combs London for the bloodthirsty psychopath who killed his brother When Tommy got out of prison, he decided to become Irish. He changed his last name to Logan, moved to southeast London, and started toting a hurleyan ash s...

  • London Boulevard

    London Boulevard is a masterful work of double-dealing and suspense from Ken Bruen, one of the great crime writers of our time. Now a major motion picture starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley, written and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter ...

  • The Guards

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 1

    Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Sochna--the Guards, Ireland's police force--and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. In his sober ...

  • Blitz: Or Brant Hits the Blues

    Inspector Brant

    Blitz represents Ken Bruen at his edgy, lethal, and sharp-tongued best, and will reward fans of his Jack Taylor novels with another astonishing, smart, and brutal vision from a writer rapidly becoming one of the best of his generation. The basis for...



  • The Killing of the Tinkers

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 2

    When Jack Taylor blew town at the end of The Guards his alcoholism was a distant memory and sober dreams of a new life in London were shining in his eyes. In the opening pages of The Killing of the Tinkers, Jack's back in Galway a year later with a n...

  • Dispatching Baudelaire

    Throughout his life accountant Mike Shaw has played it safe, kept his head down, and avoided risk. His girlfriend Brenda is a secretary. Their idea of a night on the town is to visit the local pizza parlour. But when Mike meets Laura in a bar off The...

  • The Magdalen Martyrs

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 3

    Jack Taylor is walking the delicate edge of a sobriety he doesn't trust when his phone rings. He's in debt to a Galway tough named Bill Cassell, what the locals call a "hard man." Bill did Jack a big favor a while back; the trouble is, he never lets ...

  • Vixen

    Inspector Brant

    For the Southeast London police squad, it's rough, tough, dirty business as usual. The Vixen, the most sensuos, crazed female serial killer ever, is masterminding a series of lethal explosions. She is unpredictable, wild, angry--and the cops don't ev...

  • The Dramatist

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 4

    Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober. One reason hes been able to keep clean: his dealers in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. That dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favorthe mans sister is dead and the guards have called it death b...

  • Calibre

    Inspector Brant

    Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: a long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking lot attendant is rude to a series of c...

  • American Skin

    Stephen Blake is a good man blown in bad directions. He and girlfriend Siobhan, best friend Tommy, IRA terrorist Stapleton, and a particularly American sort of psychopath named Dade, are all on a collision course somewhere between the dive bars of Ne...

  • Priest

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 5

    Ireland, awash with cash and greed, no longer turns to the Church for solace or comfort. But the decapitation of Father Joyce in a Galway confessional horrifies even the most jaded citizen. Jack Taylor, devastated by a recent personal loss, has alway...

  • Cross

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 6

    Jack Taylor brings death and pain to everyone he loves. His only hope of redemption - his surrogate son, Cody - is lying in the hospital in a coma. At least he still has Ridge, his old friend from the Guards, though theirs is an unorthodox relationsh...

  • Hardcore Hardboiled

    "I drove all the way across town to cut up this son of a bitch, but it's these three flights of stairs that got me worried..." It's meaner than a puppy juggler. It's sharper than the knife that hot babe is aiming at your back. It's got you so hard ...



  • Sanctuary

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 7

    There's something strange going on at Washington Irving Elementary School. Kids are turning into monsters -- literally! Angie knows freaky things happen sometimes. After all, it wasn't so long ago that her younger brother, Sebastian, turned into a va...

  • Once Were Cops

    Michael O'Shea is a member of Ireland's police force, known as The Guards. He's also a sociopath who walks a knife edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from th...

  • A Fifth of Bruen

    A collection of novellas and stories from Shamus Award winner Ken Bruen, author of the Jack Taylor series and the “godfather of the modern Irish crime novel” (The Irish Times). An Irishman with an ebullient love of life draws inspiration from the...

  • Tower

    “Taking up the storied themes of crime fiction -- loyalty and betrayal, temptation and treachery -- Tower lifts and elevates them, forging a tale both barbaric and baleful, swaggering and broken-hearted. Brutal, soaring street poetry to t...

  • The Devil

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 8

    America -- the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons: but not for PI Jack Taylor, whos just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an overly friendly stranger in an airport bar is the le...

  • Headstone

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 9

    In Headstone, an elderly priest is nearly beaten to death and a special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises and Jack Taylor has encountered most of them. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts an evil cote...

  • The Book of Virtue

    Bibliomysteries - 1

    With his hated father dead, a man’s life takes a dangerous turn He doesn’t cry when his father, Frank, dies. The old man was an abusive, self-absorbed drunk, and when cancer takes him to his deathbed, his son is there to watch. At Frank’s fi...

  • Purgatory

    Jack Taylor has finally found a modicum of peace. He has managed to kick, however tenuously, the substances that had a stranglehold over his life. Yet this fragile existence is threatened when a vigilante killer begins targeting citizens, signing mys...

  • C 33

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 10

    Recovering from the severe mental and physical wounds inflicted from his recent past, former cop Jack Taylor has finally found a modicum of peace. He has managed to kick the myriad substances that have had a stranglehold over his painful life, howeve...

  • Merrick

    Introducing a new character and a new novel from one of the most prominent Irish crime writers of the last two decades. For fans of Ken Bruen s Jack Taylor and Inspector Brant series, L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy, and Mystic River by Dennis Leha...



  • Green Hell

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 11

    The award-winning crime novelist Ken Bruen is as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. In Green Hell, Bruen's dark angel of a protagonist, Jack Taylor, has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead and the other has st...

  • The Emerald Lie

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 12

    Ken Bruen, the "Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel” (Irish Independent), is beloved for his black humor, verse-like prose, and irascible protagonist Jack Taylor, an ex-cop who is as addicted to trouble as he is to Jameson, pills, and pop cul...

  • The Ghosts of Galway

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 13

    Ken Bruen is a singular voice in crime fiction “with his ear for lilting Irish prose and his taste for the kind of gallows humor heard only at the foot of the gallows” (New York Times Book Review). In The Ghosts of Galway, he brings those elegiac...

  • In the Galway Silence

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 14

    Ken Bruen has been called “hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibility” (New York Times Book Review). His prose is as characteristically sharp as his outlook in the latest Jack Taylor novel, IN THE GALW...

  • Galway Girl

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 15

    Jack Taylor has never quite been able get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom. Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the loca...

  • A Galway Epiphany

    A Jack Taylor Novel - 16

    “They don’t come much tougher than Ken Bruen’s Irish roughneck, Jack Taylor, a man with bad habits who does good despite himself.”―Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review   Ex-cop-turned-PI Jack Taylor has finally escaped t...

  • Callous

    Inheriting a Galway cottage may change a troubled woman’s life -- but not the way she hopes -- in this thriller from an “original, grimly hilarious” author (The Washington Post).   Kate Mitchell’s in the process of kicking her heroin add...

  • Jack Taylor: A Mysterious Profile

    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 ReviewIn this short work, Edgar Award finalist Ken Bruen -- “a Celt...

  • Galway Confidential

    In this new installment of Ken Bruen’s beloved Jack Taylor series, the whiskey-swigging Irish detective investigates a series of violent attacks on the local convent’s nuns. Jack Taylor wakes up from a coma to discover that much of the world has ...

  • Galway's Edge

    A secretive vigilante group called Edge cleanses Galway of its worst criminals. But when someone starts picking off Edge members, private detective Jack Taylor steps in to investigate. Edge, a shadow organization made up of the most powerful figures ...



  • The Magdalene Martyrs

    • / Mystery
    • Buy

  • Wednesday's Child

    • / Thriller
    • Buy Buy

Award-Winning Books by Ken Bruen

The Dramatist
2007 Shamus Award -- P.I. Novel
The Guards
2004 Shamus Award -- P.I. Novel
The Killing of the Tinkers
2005 Macavity Award -- Mystery Novel
Tower
2010 Macavity Award -- Mystery Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Ken Bruen has published 41 books.

The next book by Ken Bruen, Galway's Edge, will be published in March 2025.

The first book by Ken Bruen, Rilke on Black, was published in June 1997.

Yes. Ken Bruen has 3 series.
Pseudonyms / Co-Author
Author Series
Multi-Author Series
Top Authors in Mystery
No ads, please...

$20 / year

FictionDB Premium Membership

Subscribe