Ken Bruen has 19 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 19 ratings. The most-rated is The Killing of the Tinkers.
The Killing of the Tinkers
Summary
Jack Taylor, a disgraced ex-cop in Galway, has slid further down the slope of despair. After a year in London, he returns to his home town of Galway with a leather coat and a coke habit. Someone is systematically slaughtering young travellers and dumping their bodies in the city centre. Even in the state he's in, Jack Taylor has an uncanny ability to know where to look, what questions to ask, and with the aid of an English policeman, apparently solves the case.
©2002 Ken Bruen (P)2009 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Guards
Summary
Still stinging from his unceremonious ouster from the Garda Siochana, and staring at the world through the smoky bottom of his beer mug, Jack Taylor is stuck in Galway with nothing to look forward to. He is teetering on the brink of his life's sharpest edges, his memories of the past cutting deep into his soul and his prospects for the future non-existent. Until a dazzling woman walks into the bar with a strange request and a rumour about Jack's talent for finding things. Odds are he won't be able to climb off his barstool long enough to get involved, but when he surprises himself by getting hired, Jack has little idea of what he's getting into.
©2001 Ken Bruen (P)2009 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Magdalen Martyrs
Summary
Jack Taylor, traumatised, bitter and hurting from his last case, has resolved to give up the finding business. However, he owes the local hard man a debt of honour, and it appears easy enough: find “the Angel of the Magdalen” – a woman who helped the unfortunates incarcerated in the infamous laundry. He is also hired by a whizz kid to prove that his father’s death was no accident. Jack treats both cases as relatively simple affairs. He becomes involved with a woman who might literally be the death of him, and runs dangerously foul of the cops. He is finally clean and sober, but the unfolding events will not only shake his sobriety but bring him as close to death as could ever have imagined.
©2003 Ken Bruen (P)2010 Isis Publishing Ltd
In the Galway Silence
Summary
After much tragedy and violence, Jack Taylor has at long last landed at contentment. Of course, he still knocks back too much Jameson and dabbles in uppers, but he has a new woman in his life, a freshly bought apartment, and little sign of trouble on the horizon. Once again, trouble comes to him - this time in the form of a wealthy Frenchman who wants Jack to investigate the double-murder of his twin sons. Jack is meanwhile roped into looking after his girlfriend's nine-year-old son and is in for a shock with the appearance of a character out of his past. The plot is one big chess game, and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious player, a vigilante called "Silence"...because he's the last thing his victims will ever hear. This is Ken Bruen at his most darkly humorous and most lovably bleak as he shows us the meaning behind a proverb of his own design - the Irish can abide almost anything save silence.
©2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Dramatist
Summary
The impossible has happened: Jack Taylor is living clean and dating a mature woman. Rumour suggests he is even attending mass. The accidental deaths of two students appear random, tragic events, except that in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. Jack begins to believe that "The Dramatist", a calculating killer, is out there, enticing him to play. As the case twists and turns, Jack's refuge, the city of Galway, now demands he sacrifice the only love he's maintained, and while Iraq burns, he seems a step away from the abyss.
©2004 Ken Bruen (P)2010 Isis Publishing Ltd
Green Hell
Summary
The award-winning crime writer Ken Bruen is as joyously unapologetic in his writing as he is wickedly poetic. In the new Jack Taylor novel Green Hell, Bruen's dark angel of a protagonist has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his addiction to alcohol and pills; and his firing from the Irish national police, the Garda, is ancient history. But Jack isn't about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead, he has taken up a vigilante case against a respected professor of literature at the University of Galway who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues a preppy American student on a Rhodes Scholarship from a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick, who abandons his thesis on Beckett to write a biography of Galway's most magnetic rogue. Between pub crawls and violent outbursts, Jack's vengeful plot against the professor soon spirals toward chaos. Enter Emerald, an edgy young Goth who could either be the answer to Jack's problems, or the last ripped stitch in his undoing. Ireland may be known as a "green Eden", but in Jack Taylor's world, the national color has a decidedly lethal sheen.
©2015 Ken Bruen (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Devil
Summary
America - the land of opportunity, a place where economic prosperity beckons - but not for PI Jack Taylor, who's just been refused entry. Disappointed and bitter, he thinks that an encounter with an over-friendly stranger in an airport bar is the least of his problems. Except that this stranger seems to know rather more than he should about Jack. Jack thinks no more of their meeting and resumes his old life in Galway. But when he’s called to investigate a student murder – connected to an elusive Mr K – he remembers the man from the airport. Is the stranger really is who he says he is? With the help of the Jameson, Jack struggles to make sense of it all. After several more murders and too many coincidental encounters, Jack believes he may have met his nemesis. But why has he been chosen? And could he really have taken on the devil himself?
©2010 Ken Bruen (P)2010 Random House Audio
A Galway Epiphany
Summary
Ex-cop-turned-PI Jack Taylor has finally escaped the despair of his violent life in Galway in favor of quiet retirement in the country with his friend Keefer, a former Rolling Stones roadie, and a falcon named Maeve. But on a day trip back into the city to sort out his affairs, Jack is hit by a truck in front of Galway’s Famine Memorial and left in a coma - but mysteriously without a scratch on him. When he awakens weeks later, he finds Ireland in a frenzy over the so-called “Miracle of Galway”. People have become convinced that the two children spotted tending to him are saintly and the site of the accident is sacred. The Catholic Church isn’t so sure, and Jack is commissioned to help find the children to verify the miracle - or expose the stunt. But Jack isn’t the only one looking for these children, and he’s about to plunge into a case involving an order of nuns, an arsonist, and a girl who may be more manipulative than miraculous.
©2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Galway Girl
Summary
Jack Taylor has never quite been able to get his life together, but now he has truly hit rock bottom. Still reeling from a violent family tragedy, Taylor is busy drowning his grief in Jameson and uppers, as usual, when a high-profile officer in the local Garda is murdered. After another Guard is found dead, and then another, Taylor’s old colleagues from the force implore him to take on the case. The plot is one big game, and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious team: a trio of young killers with very different styles, but who are united by their common desire to take down Jack Taylor. Their ring leader is Jericho, a psychotic girl from Galway who is grieving the loss of her lover and who will force Jack to confront some personal trauma from his past. As sharp and sardonic as it is starkly bleak and violent, Galway Girl shows master raconteur Ken Bruen at his best: lyrical, brutal, and ceaselessly suspenseful.
©2019 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2019 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Bust
Summary
From award-winning authors Ken Bruen and Jason Starr comes Bust, an original new noir novel by two of the world's finest crime writers. Five valuable lessons you can learn by listening to Bust: When you hire someone to kill your wife, don't hire a psychopath. Don't use Drano to get rid of a dead body. Those locks on hotel room doors? They're not very secure. A curly blond wig isn't much of a disguise. Secrets can kill.
©2015 Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Headstone
Summary
Acclaimed Irish crime writer Ken Bruen has won numerous awards for his hard-charging, dark thrillers, which have been translated into ten languages. In Headstone, an elderly priest is nearly beaten to death and a special-needs boy is brutally attacked. Evil has many guises and Jack Taylor has encountered most of them, and has the scars to prove it. But nothing before has ever truly terrified him until he confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland that leave even the national police shaken. And Jack is especially vulnerable now that he has finally found love and happiness. Jack, slowly accepting the sheer power of Headstone, comes to realize that in order to fight back he must relinquish the remaining shreds of what has made him human. Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of his life and the heart of Galway. In a moment of awful clarity, Jack realizes that not only might he be powerless to stop Headstone; he may not have the grit needed to even face it. A terrific read from a writer called "a Celtic Dashiell Hammett", Headstone is an excellent addition to the Jack Taylor series.
©2011 Original material © 2011 Ken Bruen. Recorded by arrangement with Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (P)2011 (p) 2011 HighBridge Company
Slide
Summary
From the evil geniuses who brought you Bust comes a roller-coaster ride of suspense, mayhem, and vicious fun. Max Fisher used to run a computer company; Angela Petrakos was his assistant and mistress. But that was last year. Now Max is reinventing himself as a hip-hop crack dealer, and Angela is back in Ireland hooking up with a would-be record setter - in the field of serial killing. Will their paths cross again?
©2007 Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Dramatist
Summary
Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober - off booze and pills, and nearly off cigarettes. One reason: his dealer's in jail. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn't - can't - because the man's sister is dead and the guards have called it "death by misadventure". But the dealer says that can't be true and begs Jack to see what he can find. Finding is what Jack does to make a living, with varying levels of success. He's reluctant, yet agrees to the favor, though he can't possibly know the deadly consequences to which this simple request will lead.
©2004 Ken Bruen. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press, LLC. (P)2010 BBC Audiobooks America
Purgatory
Summary
Jack Taylor thinks he has a chance at last to rest and heal from the myriad mental and physical traumas that beset him. However, after a skateboarder long suspected of dealing drugs to children is shot dead in mid-air during a public performance, Jack receives a cryptic message with a picture of the skateboarder, a clipping about a rapist gone free through procedural error, and a chilling invitation: "Your turn." The note is signed simply "C 33." From the author considered "among the most original and innovative noir voices of the last two decades" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a mystery as labyrinthine as any Jack has yet encountered - and perhaps even more deadly. Purgatory is Ken Bruen at his best: lyrical, brutal, and ceaselessly suspenseful.
©2013 Original material by Ken Bruen. Recorded by arrangement with Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (P)2013 HighBridge Company
Calibre
Summary
Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: a long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking-lot attendant is rude to a series of customers, the "Manners Killer" makes sure that the next thing either sees is the beginning of his own grisly end. When this Manners Killer starts mailing letters to the Southeast London police squad, he'll soon find out just how bad a man's manners can get. The Southeast is dominated by the perpetual sneer of one Inspector Brant. And if anyone is going to be getting away with murder on his patch, it'll be Brant himself, thank you very much.
©2006 Ken Bruen. All rights reserved. (P)2010 BBC Audiobooks America
Pimp
Summary
Dealing...producing...all in a day's work for a drug lord. Or in Hollywood. Ruined and on the lam, former drug kingpin Max Fisher stumbles upon the biggest discovery of his crooked life: a designer drug called PIMP that could put him back on top. Meanwhile, a certain femme fatale from his past is pursuing a comeback dream of her own, setting herself up in Hollywood as producer of a series based on her and Max's life story. But even in La-La Land, happy endings are hard to come by, especially with both the cops and your enemies in the drug trade coming after you.
©2016 Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Sanctuary
Summary
Two guards; one nun; one judge. When a letter containing a list of victims arrives in the post, PI Jack Taylor is sickened, but tells himself the list has nothing to do with him. He has enough to do just staying sane. His close friend Ridge is recovering from surgery and alcohol's siren song is calling to him ever more insistently. A guard and then a judge die in mysterious circumstances. But it is not until a child is added to the list that Taylor determines to find the identity of the killer, and stop them at any cost. What he doesn't know is that his relationship with the killer is far closer than he thinks. And that it's about to become deeply personal. Spiked with dark humour, seasoned with acute insights about the perils of urbanisation, and fuelled by rage at man's inhumanity to man, this is crime-writing at its darkest and most original.
©2008 Ken Bruen (P)2009 Random House Audio
The Max
Summary
Max and Angela are going down. When we last saw Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos, Max was being arrested by the NYPD for drug trafficking, and Angela was fleeing the country in the wake of a brutal murder. Now both are headed for eye-opening encounters with the law - Max in the cell blocks of Attica, Angela in a quaint little prison on the Greek island of Lesbos.
©2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Ghosts of Galway
Summary
As well-versed in politics, pop culture, and crime fiction as he is ill-fated in life, Jack Taylor is recovering from a mistaken medical diagnosis and a failed suicide attempt. In need of money - and with former cop on his resume - Jack has been hired as a night-shift security guard. But his Ukrainian boss has Jack in mind for a bit of off-the-books work. He wants Jack to find what some claim to be the first true book of heresy, The Red Book, which is currently in the possession of a rogue priest who is hiding out in Galway after fleeing the Vatican. Despite Jack's distaste for priests of any stripe, the money is too good to turn down. When Em, the many-faced woman who has had a vise on Jack's heart and mind for the past two years, reappears and turns out to be entangled with the story of The Red Book, too, Jack is led down ever more mysterious and lethal pathways....
©2017 Ken Bruen (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC