JACK TAYLOR NOVELS Priest The Dramatist The Magdalen Martyrs The Killing of the Tinkers The Guards BRANT NOVELS Calibre Vixen Blitz The McDead Taming the Alien A White Arrest CRIME NOVELS American Skin Dispatching Baudelaire London Boulevard Her Last Call to Louis Macneice The Hackman Blues Rilke on Black THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS US In the third Jack Taylor novel from acclaimed crime writer Ken Bruen, Jack has sunk to all new lows with his alcoholism. Knowing his next visit to the hospital will be his last, his days of deep depression are punctuated only by nights of tense insomnia. But when he gets a tip off about a missing girl named Rita Monroe, his ex-cop brain pulls his body into action. Rita had been one of the Magdalen girls, a group of unmarried mothers who had been consigned into slavery in a nun-run laundry. With his uncanny ability to look in all the right place, Jack sets out on Rita's trail. Buy the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or an independent bookstore. PRAISE UK "Suffice it to say that fans of Roddy Doyle, James Sallis, Samuel Beckett, Irvine Welsh, Frederick Exley, Patrick McCabe, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, and Chuch Palahniuk will all find something to like, love, or obsess over in this stiff shot of evil chased with heart-breaking irony. Highly recommended."    —Booklist (starred review) "This third entry in Bruen's Jack Taylor series is arguably the bleakest to date, but also the best. Completely compelling....One of the best current crime series."    —Library Journal "Jack Taylor's adventures are recounted in a strong narrative voice. And the plot ingeniously incorporates the Magdalen laundry, a notoriously harsh home for wayward girls."    —Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Unlike anything you'll find between two covers. Bruen has written an eye-popper of a story - again. Unforgettable."    —Rocky Mountain News (Denver) "Edgar finalist Bruen's third Jack Taylor noir mystery-thriller crackles with his trademark tough-guy bravado. Readers will appreciate Bruen's stripped-down noir poetry, his superbly rendered sense of place and his evocative portrait of a person balanced on the razor's edge."    —Publishers Weekly "A relentlessly dark yet never dreary series. An array of good writers, from Ralph W. Emerson to George P. Pelecanos, are quoted throughout. It's a class of writer that includes Bruen himself."    —Kirkus Reviews "The Magdalen Martyrs is the third of Irishman Ken Bruen's raw and fiercely funny books about Jack Taylor. Taylor's not much of a detective and he's a mess of a human being, but he's also fabulous company - a two-fisted, garrulous intellectual, unafraid of festooning his narrative with digressions and apt quotes from favorite writers."    —Seattle Times "Irish novelist Ken Bruen writes with a terse, almost clipped prose style very different from his equally eloquent but longer-winded contemporaries P.D. James and Ian Rankin. Instead of lengthy descriptive passages about place and character, Bruen's sparse style allows the reader's imagination to fill in the spaces between his sentences, and, considering the bleakness of his stories, it's an effective ploy.... Even with an alcoholic's penchant for violence and manipulation, Taylor is a deeply compassionate man with a strong sense of humanity and justice. Bruen, who never wastes a word, combines a superb crime novel with a serious cautionary tale, told with unnerving, crystalline precision."    —Peter Handel, OregonLive.com