The Dramatist, Ken Bruen
The Dramatist, Ken Bruen
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

The Dramatist

Author: Ken Bruen

Narrator: Michael Deehy

Unabridged: 4 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/01/2010


Synopsis

Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober—off booze, pills, powder, and nearly off cigarettes, too. The main reason he’s been able to keep clean: his dealer’s in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the soiled, sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn’t—can’t, because the dealer’s sister is dead, and the guards have called it “death by misadventure.” The dealer knows that can’t be true and begs Jack to have a look, check around, see what he can find out. It’s exactly what Jack does, with varying levels of success, to make a living. But he’s reluctant, maybe because of who’s asking or maybe because of the bad feeling growing in his gut.Never one to give in to bad feelings or common sense, Jack agrees to the favor, though he can’t possibly know the shocking, deadly consequences he has set in motion. But he and everyone he holds dear will find out soon, sooner than anyone knows, in the lean and lethal fourth entry in Ken Bruen’s award-winning Jack Taylor series.

About Ken Bruen

Ken Bruen, the critically acclaimed author of the Jack Taylor series and The White Trilogy, is the recipient of two Barry Awards and two Shamus Awards and has twice been a finalist for the Edgar Award.

About Michael Deehy

Michael Deehy is an Earphones Award-winning narrator and an actor whose career has taken him around the world performing in a multitude of plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, Synge, and a host of other playwrights. He divides his time between the United States and England, where he has performed in both regional theater and in London’s West End, as well as a number of national television shows.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Greg

This is the fourth book in the Jack Taylor series of novels, and the fifth one that I've read. And the seventh book of Ken Bruen's I've gotten through in the past couple of months. There is something predictable about Bruen. There are set ups and scenes he uses over and over again, and there are alm......more


Quotes

“Ken Bruen is hard to resist, with his aching Irish heart, silvery tongue, and bleak noir sensibility…[Bruen] writes with extraordinary delicacy about a man driven to acts of violence out of wild grief and [a] fierce sense of guilt.” New York Times Book Review

“Bruen’s tommy-gun prose, lacerating dialogue, and hard-boiled world view combine here, as before, to provide entertainment of high order in dealing with low instincts. Forget all gauzy notions of the Emerald Isle—this stuff is black Irish.” New York Daily News

“Bruen’s books are always well worth the effort.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“You’ll want to pray at the stunning conclusions of The Dramatist…Bruen’s talent shines.” Cleveland Plain Dealer

“It’s Taylor himself, dangerous, disgraced cop, that we want to read about.…If you haven’t discovered Bruen yet, what are you waiting for?” Rocky Mountain News

“With a riveting mystery and a deftly rendered protagonist, Bruen recaptures the immediacy and the impact of the first two novels in the series.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is a darkness about Bruen’s Ireland that never lifts. The spare writing is brutal in its depiction of modern depression, social malaise, and total lack of hope.” Library Journal


Awards

  • Shamus Award
  • Barry Award