Ken Bruen pushes it. A coke addict lead? Down's Syndrome? Decapitated swans? Heading chapters with ominous epigrams, cutting dialogue to verse and writing narrative that is often closer to bulleted memoranda, clearly Bruen is going for first prize in the unending James Ellroy, blacker-than-black, who-can-out-noir-who, "No, I'm the heir to Dashiell Hammet!" contest among current crime fiction novelists. And, despite himself, he at least places (ahead, I think, of both Pelacanos and Lehane). Like a cocky illusionist or the smoothest of con men, Bruen flaunts his affectations and contrivances one after the other before your very eyes ( his lead's cutesy affinity for dark literature, his irresistability to beautiful, too-young women, the wee bit o' Irish mugging 'ere 'n 'ere), subscribes to all the old genre conventions (his hero is a loner, a wiseass, an outcast with an outlaw code) and still manages to turn the trick of making you believe..and read on.

In "The Killing of The Tinkers" former guard, current alcoholic and drug addict, Jack Taylor, has barely returned to his home of Galway when he is approached by a tinker--an Irish gypsy--to investigate the killings of his people--murders the guards could care less about solving. Jack, an outcast and drifter himself, feels a connection with the tinkers and takes the job which, in turn, takes Taylor to perilous places within and without. This is Bruen's second Jack Taylor novel, and it is as he wants it: a dark blur of unsentimental wretchedness. No one is happy here for long. The tone is unabashed Irish melancholia. The pacing is jump-cut and unforgiving (there's too much happening now to go back and check what you may have missed). Throughout, the prose carries the shadings of a bruise--you read on gingerly.

Reading back, I see this comes off as a back-handed recommendation (which it might well be) so I'll finish with what is obviously good about the book. What words there are are well written. The characters, while being familiar 'types', do come alive with fresh specifics. The drama as a whole plays out convincingly and unpredictably. And the ending, which you can only intelligently guess at a couple pages before, carries with it the organic inevitability that smacks of real literature and leaves in its wake (Irish?) the discomforting echo that few other tough-guy tomes achieve.