Green Hell — Ken Bruen

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 stopped speaking to him; he has given up on sobriety; and his firing from the Irish national police is ancient history.

But Jack isn't about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway who has developed a savage habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. Jack unexpectedly gains a new sidekick after rescuing a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs. The student, a Rhodes scholar, decides to devote himself to slinging back shots of Jameson and writing a biography of Galway's most magnetic rogue. Between pub crawls and street fights, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals towards chaos, putting both the student and himself in danger. Enter Emerald, an edgy young goth who could either be the answer to Jack's problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing. Ireland may be known as a "green Eden," but in Jack Taylor's world, the national color has a lethal sheen.