Description de l’éditeur
A dark, edgy novel from a master of Irish crime fiction who "is threatening to become a mass cult figure in the U.S. as well as a critical favorite" (The Atlantic).
An elderly priest is nearly beaten to death. A special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises, and private investigator Jack Taylor has encountered most of them. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts a group calling itself Headstone, responsible for a series of random violent crimes in Galway, Ireland.
As Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of Taylor's life, he will need to call upon his own capacity for brutality in order to stop them, in this suspenseful novel from a writer called "a Celtic Dashiell Hammett" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
"A nonstop rampage of intrigue, mayhem, lunacy and dark-dark-dark humor." —Shelf Awareness
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish author Bruen's hard-hitting ninth Jack Taylor novel (after The Devil) finds the Galway PI coping with alcoholism, a permanent limp, hearing loss, and emotional scars that continually threaten to take him down. For once, however, Taylor appears to have found a promising love interest in Laura, an American-born crime novelist, with whom he's recently enjoyed a romantic idyll in Paris. Of course, moments of grace are fleeting in Bruen's world, and things rapidly head south after Taylor receives a miniature gravestone in the post, courtesy of a group of psychopaths calling themselves "Headstone." Led by a fanatic recidivist criminal from a previous Taylor case, they target the "weak," including the handicapped, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Now they have their sights set on Taylor and everyone close to him. That the plot is a tad cartoonish and over-the-top scarcely matters in a remarkable series that at heart is about one man's reckoning with a lifetime of pain and loss in a rapidly changing Ireland.
