The Magdalen Martyrs

This is book #3 of the Jack Taylor series. If you read the reviews, you'll see they are polarizing novels. Some see them as a celtic noir take on pulp fiction, others find them unrelentingly grim & derivative. 
Jack's past is well established & informs his situation & choices. Hopelessly addicted to booze & anything else that blurs his reality, this is a man desperate to forget the past while trying to decide if he wants a future. The books are narrated in the first person, full of Jack's personal allusions to literary snippets that speak to him & brutal self awareness.
This instalment follows the author's typical format of weaving together two stories: a new missing persons investigation & Jack's current position on his downward spiral. show more After being hospitalized for seizures, Jack is back on the wagon. He's contacted by Bill Cassell, a hard man who calls in a favour. Bill is dying & wants Jack to find Rita Monroe, a woman who helped his mother when she was an inmate at the infamous Magdalen laundries. 
Jack is anxious to clear his debt & takes the job. In fleeting moments of sobriety, he excels as a finder & soon has a second case. Terry Boyle, a smug young businessman, wants Jack to prove his step mother killed his father. Officially it was labelled a heart attack but Terry believes his dad got a little help from Kirsten the trophy wife.
Jack enlists the help of Brendan Flood, another ex-guard who found religion. He investigates the Magdalen while Jack tracks down Rita. Meanwhile, two young men who are college students are assassinated in seemingly random attacks. 
Both of his cases lead Jack to women who will play pivotal roles. One is Kirsten, a manipulative pleasure seeking widow with friends in high places. The other is Rita. She used to work as a matron at the Magdalen in the 1950's & is not exactly what Jack is expecting.
Interspersed with the current events are short vignettes of daily life at the laundry. It was a home for "troubled" girls, unwed mothers, petty thieves & those whose parents couldn't afford to keep them. This was an actual facility run by the church & when the truth about the living conditions/treatment of the girls was later revealed, the resulting scandal shook all of Ireland.
How you rate this book is not really a question of whether or not it's well written. It's a matter of taste. The reader spends a lot of time in Jack's head, an interesting if bleak place. He's a compelling guy. He changes his vices like his socks & when he temporarily stops drinking it's a small victory as he shifts to a diet of pharmaceuticals. Of all the people out to get him, he is his own worst enemy.
The one constant in his life are his beloved books & he has a quote for every occasion. The author leaves the flowery prose to these writers, telling his story in lean, spare sentences that run the gamut from starkly poetic to the blackest humour from a character who is brutally honest with himself.
The rest of the cast are not exactly little rays of sunshine either. With 2 possible exceptions, these are not nice people. They are unburdened by morals, users with hidden agendas & we gradually learn Jack is being set up. In spite of his commitment to self destruction, he shows a surprising talent for survival. And some of the characters who underestimated his resilience will pay.
This is not a beach book. It's dark, violent, sad & meditative. But there also moments when you catch a glimpse of something bearing a passing resemblance to hope. The story of the Magdalen is heartbreaking because it's true. But the investigation aspect of the plot takes a back seat to the character study of our "hero".
It all boils down to Jack. It can be like watching an impending train wreck & if you find him compelling, you'll enjoy this. If not, you probably won't give the series a second chance. show less

This is the third book in the Jack Taylor series, and we find that not much has changed with Jack. He's still living in the same third rate hotel and being looked after by the octogenarian woman who owns the establishment. He is still drinking, smoking and taking all kinds of drugs. And he keeps finding himself in personal danger as he pursues his lines of enquiries. Jack is fully aware of his shortcomings, and he has oodles of coping mechanisms to help him deal with his self-loathing. For example he is a voracious reader, and he retreats to his books whenever he needs to find time to think. Only the best for our Jack - books from his favourite used bookstore, clothes from the charity shops and a full pharmacopia of drugs in the show more floorboards of his room. I love these books. Bruen's writing is spare and to the point. He says more in such few words than most novelists can manage in large tomes. We see the dark underside of Galway, Ireland through Jack's jaded eyes (and usually through an alcoholic fog). In this book we pursue some of the history and the horror stories from the now-closed Magdalen Laundry in Galway. Many young girls were left here and forgotten when they found themselves unmarried and pregnant, or on the wrong side of the law. The establishment opened in the 18th century and were finally closed sometime in the mid-20th century. The stories that come from these Catholic institutions are horrendous and heartbreaking and Jack finds himself drawn into them while he's trying to find someone who used to work in the laundry at one time. This is a quick read, but a very good one. Kept me turning pages for sure. show less

Bruen's noir style is clipped and to the point. Through Jack Taylor, he might make you laugh and cry on the same page. Even though Taylor is a drunken drug addict, he still captures the heart as an ex-Garda who is willing to take on the criminals of Galway single-handed. Another impressive Emerald noir story from Bruen. As usual, it's a good idea to take note of his music and reading.

"The Magdalen Martyrs" is the third book in Ken Bruen’s addicting (pun intended) Jack Taylor series and for me it was the book that finally caught me up on the series to-date. I mention this only because of the way my knowledge of the future of a few of the characters in "The Magdalen Martyrs" might have affected my reaction to the roles they play in this book.

Jack Taylor, by many standards, is an awful man. He is no stranger to violence - an alcoholic, a user of hard drugs both recreationally (including during sex) and to escape his troubles, not a man to be taken lightly. By other standards, though, Jack is a good and an interesting man. He will not walk blindly past a father publicly abusing his child; he respects the elderly for show more their experience; he is loyal to the core when it comes to old friends and old haunts; he is a literate man who knows history and loves books as much as physical objects as for what is inside them. Jack is also smart enough to know that he has caused most of his own problems in life but not smart enough to change the habits that keep him in so much trouble.

When Bill Cassell, an Irish mobster to whom Jack owes a personal favor, asks him to find the woman who helped Cassell’s mother escape the old Magdalen laundry decades earlier, Jack gets busy because he knows that no one refuses Bill Cassell and lives to talk about it. The Magdalen, once a church-run home for promiscuous young women, was staffed by nuns, one of whom, in particular, took delight in physically abusing the girls as punishment for their promiscuity. A few of the girls died at this woman’s hands, so to have escaped the Magdalen for a new life on the outside was akin to a clean jailbreak.

"The Magdalen Martyrs" is about fighting demons and there is no one better equipped to battle demons than Jack Taylor, be they demons from the present, from his past, or even from before he was born. Taylor, while simultaneously working two separate investigations, confronts the evils of the long-gone Magdalen laundry, his own multiple addictions, his violent temper, his intense hatred of his elderly mother, and his contempt for his mother’s pet priest, the odious Father Malachy – among other demons.

As always, a Jack Taylor novel is more about the man than the cases he works – exactly what keeps fans of the series coming back for more. Despite his many flaws, Jack Taylor is an easy man to like, and I wholeheartedly recommend the entire Jack Taylor series to readers who enjoy delving into an intriguing character to the depth that a long series, such as this one has become, allows.

Readers with the stomach for dark, hardcore action simply will not want to miss Jack Taylor.

Rated at: 5.0 show less

The Magdalene Asylums, as they were called, were institutions for "fallen women". The first opened in Dublin in the 1700s. The objective was to rehabilitate these misguided women and release them back into society. These places were maintained by nuns. The inmates were used for hard manual labor, mainly in laundries and were subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Many took their own lives.
Jack Taylor, our favorite alcoholic ex-cop from Galway, is hired by a local gangster to locate a particularly nasty nun, nicknamed Lucifer, who abused his mother, fifty years earlier, in a Magdalene “Home”. Bruen has a gritty but poetic narrative style and seems to have a deep understanding of chemical dependency. This is the third book in a show more terrific series! Highly recommended! show less

Ken Bruen's writing feels like home to me. Not that I live in the world of addiction and despair and brutal measures - or, for that matter, anywhere near Ireland - but I connected with every word and phrase at some deep and visceral level. I found myself thinking that KB's truths were the most true, his observations the most stark and real, his characters the most honest, for all their bleakness.

The heartbreaking backbone story is merely the structure on which the rest of the book, and all its relationships, hang - as I've said many times before, this is how I think crime writing should work.

The *only* issue I had was that, though I found 80% of the quotes preceding the chapters absolutely brilliant, I did not understand how they show more related to the story. My deficit, I'm sure, but still...

OTOH, the contemporary/retro literature/music references weave into a background that - more than the sum of its parts - sets the narrator in place and time beautifully (even though I've never been to Ireland and, I'm sure, missed quite a bit of what makes the book, according to the Washington Post, "gloriously Irish").

Didn't want this book to end. Going back to buy more. show less

This is the third in the Jack Taylor series, a great Irish noir crime series, very readable, although it should probably come with a warning about violence. In this one, Jack is asked to track down a woman who used to work at the Magdalen laundry, a place where young "fallen" women were kept in punitive circumstances. Jack lurches from incident to incident, but is as stubborn as a mule, so does finally get the information he requires. And then keeps on digging.

This was, as usual, a gripping page turner, although I might have to have a break from Jack Taylor, his alcoholism/addictions and subsequent stupidity is just making me angry. I want to reach into the book and shake him until his teeth have all fallen out.