Once Were Cops

Being a fan of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to Bruen’s spare, but brutally harsh, prose. (Jack Taylor fans will note that Jack makes a very brief cameo appearance in this new novel, by the way.) Bruen is not a man who wastes words on the niceties of long descriptive passages about his settings or characters. Rather, his characters speak for themselves and, through them and their words, Bruen paints a more vivid description of their world, and where they fit into it, than many authors could do half as well in a 500-page novel.

Bruen has done it again in Once Were Cops, his new novel about an Irish cop who comes to New York City on an exchange program of sorts and impacts the NYPD in negative ways show more that no one would have believed possible beforehand. O’Shea, who blackmailed a superior into recommending him for the transfer to New York, is a psychopath of the first degree, a man thrilled to be carrying a gun and who seems to be perfectly paired with his new NYPD partner. That partner, a veteran cop by the name of Kebar, is as much a wild man in his own way as O’Shea, and the two are soon having great success on the city’s streets.

Unfortunately for both men, though, Kebar has already drawn the attention of Internal Affairs and it seems to be only a matter of time before he finds himself jailed, or at the very least, drummed out of the department. Bruen tells his story largely through the eyes and words of O’Shea, who is finding it so hard to keep his psychopathic urges under control that he has become little more than a ticking time bomb.

Bruen masterfully builds the suspense until events force Kebar to a breaking point from which he is unlikely to escape and it becomes just a question of who will survive to pick up the pieces, and whether or not O’Shea will go down with him if he crashes.

Once Were Cops is set in a surrealistic world in which extreme violence is the order of the day. It offers a dark vision of those in charge of enforcing the law on both sides of the Atlantic, often characterizing cops as little more than criminals that wear uniforms and badges. But, even though the novel seems to be set in the Gotham City of the darkest Batman movies, it works well because of the way that Bruen presents it without wasting a single word – a “black and white” style that perfectly fits the scary world he has created.

Once Were Cops is scheduled for an October 28 release.

Rated at: 4.0 show less

It seems that every time Bruen loses out on that Edgar Award (nominated last year for Priest), he turns around and produces another gem that proves he is worthy of substantial accolades. This novel of sociopathic, Bronson-like police officers, New Yorker Kebar & his Galway-transferred partner Shea, is fast, furious, dark, dark, dark, and unabashedly hilarious. Shea’s unrelenting murderous tendencies tend to hamper his policing abilities, but prepare to be blindsided - although you know that Shea will eventually do something really, really crazy, there's no way that you're prepared for his level of sadism - or his intelligence and ability to climb the corporate ladder. Good times!

Where Do I Begin?

Ken Bruen writes in his own form of poetry.

The words pull no punches.

His characters make no apologies.

They will do as the damn well please and sometimes there are simply not enough good guys to go around.

You think.

It's hard to tell who is a good guy and who isn't.

ONCE WERE COPS isn't going to be a novel for everyone.

It's hard, bad, dark, violent, unapologetic, difficult and complex.

There are no winners and there are lots of losers.

Don't read it if you want a happy ending (or a neatly tied off resolution for that matter).

Do read it if you like a walk on the dark side.

Do read it if you're looking for something outside the box.

'Once Were Cops' isn't a typical police novel. Heck it's not even a typical novel. Most paragraphs are exactly one sentence long and, clocking in at 293 pages of a lot of white space, it's either a novella or a really long short story. That being said, it'll grab your interest quickly and propel you forward as the action picks up. And there's a lot of action in those short paragraphs.

Michael O' Shea is a young Irish cop who wrangles himself, using some pretty tough negotiating skills, into an exchange program that places him on the NYPD for a year. He also has a secret that he'll carry over to the US with him. In his new role he's paired with a psycho cop who's on the take, which quickly leads to many confrontations that expose Shea, as show more he's known, as not quite the cute lad with the adorable Irish accent everyone assumes he is. He battles the mob, his superiors, other cops, Internal Affairs, and his demons and manages to win, at least until he doesn't.

This is my initial foray into Ken Bruen's catalog and I'd have to say I'm intrigued. This book was very short but chock full of action, violence, and tricky plotting. I know he has a couple series out there and I suppose I'll try to get into them. I can't say I'm a fan of the single-sentence paragraph but I'm a sucker for Ireland-informed writing so we'll see what happens. Once Were Cops is definitely a quick, intense read by a writer who knows his territory. show less

Once were Cops. Ken Bruen. 2009. Two Ken Bruen novels within 6 months! What a treat! A psychopathic Irish “guard” manages to get sent to New York to work with the NYPD. He is paired with Kebar, who is almost as sick as he it. It is a violent as any Bruen novel with exciting twists and turns. A critic calls Bruen’s style, “clipped free verse.” I have never read a writer who could evoke such horror one minute and such sweetness the next. Bruen is an incredible writer if you can stand the violence.

Written in the same spare, sparse, harsh prose that Bruen uses for his Jack Taylor series, Once Were Cops is primarily the story of two cops—Michael O’Shea, a serial killer doing double duty as a new cop who blackmailed his way to New York as a policeman on an exchange program from Galway, and Kebar, whom “Shea” is paired with, a rough cop-on-the-take whose one soft spot is his mentally retarded sister who lives in a group home. He panders to the mob to get extra money to keep Lucia in a good home. Both men are violent, living lives outside the law and basically do what they want. While this book is written in similar style to the Jack Taylor series, there is a huge difference. This book really had no soul; it was just nasty and show more violent and depressing without having the emotional connection, the poetic side to the staccato, bleak prose that Bruen infuses into the story of Jack Taylor. I really didn’t care for this book at all. I was unable to connect with the characters in any way. I can’t say I really hated them, certainly didn’t like them—I just didn’t care one way or another what happened to them. It seemed to be just one violent episode after another. If there was supposed to be some sort of message or moral or whatever, I didn’t see it. And the one thing that might have salvaged the book to make it a worthwhile read—a quirky plot twist at the end of the book—I anticipated well in advance. I’m not sure what the author was trying to achieve with this book, but all it did for me was to cause him to fall down off the pedestal he’d been firmly ensconced on previous to my reading this story. There was one good thing about this book: it was short. show less

The story is told in short staccato single sentences and a lot of “what I was go to say” verses what I said
This gets tiresome very quickly.
The story was good and the author did a good job flipping back and forth from the way an Irishman would talk or an American would, but the again the story structure was not good, at least for me.