Brand new stories by: Ken Bruen, Eoin Colfer, Jason Starr, Laura Lippman, Olen Steinhauer, Peter Spiegelman, Kevin Wignall, Jim Fusilli, John Rickards, Patrick J. Lambe, Charlie Stella, Ray Banks, James O. Born, Sarah Weinman, Pat Mullan, Gary Phillips, Craig McDonald, Duane Swierczynski, Reed Farrel Coleman, and others.

Irish crime-fiction sensation Ken Bruen and cohorts shine a light on the dark streets of Dublin. Dublin Noir features an awe-inspiring cast of writers who between them have won all major mystery and crime-fiction awards. This collection introduces secret corners of a fascinating city and surprise assaults on the "Celtic Tiger" of modern Irish prosperity.

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. Now he stands poised on the precipice of the most devastating decision of his career, while at the same time a rare opportunity of real and enduring love also materialises. As with The Guards, the city of Galway dances, jeers, consoles, threatens, entices, near kills and yet continues to be the ultimate ground of Jack Taylor's transcendence, all he understands of heaven and hell.

Ken won a Macavity Award for The Killing of the Tinkers… it won for best novel! He was also nominated for an Anthony and a Barry Award.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This first-time collaboration between two rising crime fiction writers is a full-tilt, rocking homage to noir novels of the 1950s, taking full advantage of the neo-pulp Hard Case Crime imprint. Wealthy, successful New York City business owner Max Fisher finds himself in a delightfully familiar scenario: he wants to get rid of his nagging wife so he can shack up with his sexy secretary, Angela Petrakos. When Angela introduces Max to Dillon, a former IRA hit man, Max thinks he's found his man; what Max doesn't know is that Dillon is already Angela's man—and the two plan to double-cross Max as soon as it becomes profitable. Dillon, however, proves to be less a professional than a psychotic: he'd just as soon kill "for the price of a pint" as he would for Max's wealth. Rolling in on the action is wheelchair-bound Bobby Rosa, an ex-con with a taste for lewd photography, guns and blackmail. As it tends to do, the murderous plot goes awry, sending Bruen and Starr's delicious, despicable characters scrambling for their money and their lives. A seamless blend of Bruen's dead-on Irish underworld and Starr's hellish vision of the Big Apple, Hard Case's latest release is smart, trashy fun, fulfilling ably the series' irresistible promise. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

All-star jams are usually disappointing; put Keith Richards and Eddie Van Halen onstage together, and they won't have a feel for each other's songs. The authors' star status may be debatable, but in the tiny world of two--author novels, the analogy is worthwhile. Both Bruen and Starr have strong, idiosyncratic voices: Bruen favors deep-thinking, soulful heroes, while Starr leans toward shallow losers. Will Bust be number one with a bullet or a B-side? The plot, which seems Starr-like, concerns a New York businessman who hires someone to kill his wife so he can marry his secretary. There are crosses and double-crosses, miscalculations and blunders, and plenty of dead bodies. Written in limited third-person--a smart approach--it reads as if each writer writes for certain characters (and would Bruen let Starr write the Irishman?). For those who like the bungling-criminal genre, this is good fun. Those who prefer to empathize won't like it as much. But it's only a diversion for fans of either writer: like an all-star jam, this one isn't quite equal to the sum of its talent. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

PRAISE FOR KEN BRUEN

"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."—
Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

"Bruen is an original, grimly hilarious and gloriously Irish. I await the further adventures of the incorrigible Jack Taylor."—Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

"Bruen is a brilliant, lyrical, deeply moving writer who can make you laugh and cry in the same paragraph and whose characters are so sharply portrayed that they almost walk off the page at you. If you like Ian Rankin, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and the like, Bruen is definitely a writer to reckon with."—
The Denver Post

"Bruen's furious, hard-boiled prose, chopped down to its trademark essence, never fails to astonish.... among the finest noir stylists of his generation." —Publishers Weekly

"Bruen's tommy-gun prose, lacerating dialogue, and hard-boiled worldview combine to provide entertainment of high order in dealing with low instincts."—New York Daily News

"The next major new Irish voice we hear might well belong to Ken Bruen."—Chicago Tribune

"Spare and unforgiving, Bruen's novels are among the best."—Rocky Mountain News

"Ken Bruen is a supremely bold and confident stylist."—Jocelyn Clark, Sunday Tribune (Ireland)

"A Celtic Dashiell Hammett."—Philadelphia Inquirer

Product Description

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. 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.

Most would see a headstone as a marker of the dead, but this organization seems like it will act as a death knell to every aspect of Jack’s life. Jack’s usual allies, Ridge and Stewart, are also in the line of terror. An act of appalling violence alerts them to the sleeping horror, but this realization may be too late, as Headstone barrels along its deadly path right to the center of Jack’s life and the heart of Galway. A terrific read from a writer called “a Celtic Dashiell Hammett,” Headstone is an excellent addition to the Jack Taylor series (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Review

Starred Review. Bruen and Starr's third tag-team free-for-all seems engineered to be a pleasure of the guiltiest kind, like No Country for Old Men as directed by Mel Brooks. Max Fisher, legend in his own mind, is finally where he truly belongs: prison. Will his backside withstand the unwelcome attention of the Crips, the Aryan Brotherhood, and his hulking cell mate Rufus? Does bullshit float? For a time, yes, and Max swaggers like Don Rickles cast as Travis Bickle. Far away, Max's ex, Angela Petrakos, is engaged in bloody deeds with the slimy roué Sebastian (a dead ringer for Lee Child), which will land her in the caged heat of a lesbian prison; well, it is prison on the Isle of Lesbos. Meanwhile, aspiring true-crime writer Paula Segal agonizes over her lust for Laura Lippman, but would go to the altar--and even the conjugal trailer--with the repulsive Max in her ruthless hunt for fame. Bruen and Starr's dirty rotten scoundrels and natural born killers do some very bad things in this sleazy grind house, the depraved and daft descendant of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 (1964), Joel Rose's Kill Kill, Faster Faster (1997), John Ridley's Everyone Smokes in Hell (1999), and in prose liberally peppered with noir in-jokes, literary references and epigraphs, and pop-culture tags. Are we going to have to separate you boys? Let's hope not. -- David Wright Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- From Booklist

Product Description

MAX AND ANGELA ARE GOING DOWN!

When last we 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…