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Summary
Summary
Michael O'Shea is a member of Ireland's police force, known as The Guards. He's also a sociopath who walks a knife edge between sanity and all-out mayhem. When an exchange program is initiated and twenty Guards come to America and twenty cops from the States go to Ireland, Shay, as he's known, has his lifelong dream come true--he becomes a member of the NYPD. But Shay's dream is about to become New York's nightmare.
Paired with an unstable cop nicknamed Kebar for his liberal use of a short, lethal metal stick called a K-bar, the two unlikely partners become a devastatingly effective force in the war against crime.
But Kebar harbors a dangerous secret: he's sold out to the mob to help his sister. Her rape and beating leaves her in a coma and pushes an already unstable Kebar over the edge just as Shea's dark secrets threaten boil over and into the streets of New York.
Once Were Cops melds the street poetry of Brooklyn and Dublin into a fast-paced, incomparable hard-boiled novel. This is Ken Bruen at his best.
Author Notes
Ken Bruen was born in 1951 in Galway, Ireland. He was educated at Gormanston College, Meath and later at Trinity College Dublin where he earned a PhD. in metaphysics. He spent 25 years as an English teacher in Africa, Japan, Asia and South America. Ken Bruen's works include the well reeived White Trilogy and a book entitled The Guards, which won a Shamus Award .He also edited an anthology of stories set in Dublin entitled Dublin Noir. His writing speciality is crime fiction. Some of his other works include The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, and The Dramatist and Priest, which was nominated for the 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. Ken Bruen is also the recipient of the first David Loeb Gooodis Award in 2008 for his dedication to his art.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this stripped-down dark thrill ride from Edgar-finalist Bruen (The Guards), a psychotic Irish cop, Matthew Patrick O'Shea ("everybody called me Shea"), blackmails his way into a green card and a police exchange program that takes him from Galway to New York City for a one-year stint with the NYPD. Partnered with the brutal Kurt "Kebar" Browski ("he looked like a pit bull in uniform"), the clever sociopath, who has a hidden predilection for serial rape and strangulation, brazenly advances his ambitions despite intense attention from Internal Affairs and a mobster named Morronni. An acknowledged master of contemporary noir, Bruen touches all his usual themes in his trademark clipped postmodern style, a deft shorthand that enables him to romp at will through genre clichEs to quickly reach deeper and more dangerous depths. No one is safe as this shocker spins wildly toward a violent finish. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Michael O'Shea is a handsome young member of the Guard, Ireland's police force. He is also a sociopath with a deep need to strangle beautiful women with his rosary beads and inflict biblical damage on other people. By blackmailing a politician, he gets an exchange assignment with the NYPD, and he is partnered with Kebar, whose nonstop rage and capacity for violence make him a pariah even to his fellow cops. Shea, as he likes to be called, and Kebar police New York like Viking berserkers until Shea turns his ire on his partner. The prolific Bruen has created Irish psychos before, as in Slide (2007), coauthored with Jason Starr, but Slide was played for laughs. Shea is an otherworldly malevolence who makes Once Were Cops a chilling and deeply creepy read. That Bruen renders such a remarkable character in what might be called clipped free verse is further proof of his writing talent. Still, this is anything but easy reading and just might prove more than some crime fans can handle.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Every historical novel has its "Aren't you glad?" moments. In COMPANY OF LIARS (Delacorte, $24), a jewel of a medieval mystery by Karen Maitland, those would be the times when you realize how lucky you are not to be living in England in 1348, when three separate plagues broke out among a population already beaten down by the deprivations of the Hundred Years War. The novel's aged narrator, a hideously scarred peddler of bogus religious relics called Camelot, finds himself leading a small band of outcasts to safe haven in the north of the country after word arrives that a pestilence has struck nearby. Each of the travelers on this grueling journey - including an albino child, two Italian minstrels, an ill-tempered magician and a one-armed storyteller - has a guilty secret, and one of them may be a murderer. Either that or the wolf howling at night whenever one of them is about to die is no metaphor. Like Chaucer's pilgrims, the wanderers pass the long nights telling tales. And it's only natural that supernatural elements should permeate their stories, since that was how the people of this profoundly superstitious world tried to make sense of the inexplicable events of their lives. But woe to those whose fantasies become too real. "Storytellers are always suspect," Camelot observes. "They are exotic strangers. . . . They don't belong." Sure enough, when a child is murdered, the enraged mob turns on Cygnus, the mesmerizing fabulist who believes himself to be half swan - and has the wing feathers to prove it. Maitland's own narrative strength is her skill at setting scenes that connect the harsh realities of medieval life with the no less cruel pagan customs and Christian rituals meant to explain and contain those realities. At every stop, the travelers become participants in some sad or horrific event, from the macabre "cripples' wedding" meant to fend off disease to the live burial of a suspected witch. Throughout it all, they remain pariahs, abandoned outside the walls of the not-so-civilized society of their day. No wonder they told stories to keep themselves warm. Say you're an Irish writer of hard-boiled crime novels and you have this character, a serial killer who strangles women with green rosary beads ("I like the color"), and you want to hide him in plain sight. What would you do with him? In ONCE WERE COPS (St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95), Ken Bruen, whose bullet-in-the-brain prose style is the envy of many a noir scribbler, dispatches his psycho, Matthew Patrick O'Shea, to the New York Police Department on an exchange program with the Irish Garda. O'Shea isn't all bad - the evil lies in just one half of his split personality. The other half wants to be a good cop, and much of this bluntly brutal narrative is about his attempts to fit into a foreign environment, to learn the drill without giving away his homicidal secret or losing his national identity. (One point of honor is that he inflicts his beatings in an Irish manner - with a hurling bat.) Language is crucial to this tense masquerade; and while O'Shea prides himself on learning the lingua franca, the more American idiom he absorbs, the more his language flattens out. Back home, his raging thoughts came out in bursts of ragged poetry, but by the end of this book he's beginning to sound like just another smartaleck New Yorker. A painterly eye for a scholarly subject confers considerable charm on Ruth Brandon's CARAVAGGIO'S ANGEL (Soho Constable, $25), in which an ambitious art curator, Reggie Lee, tries to make a good impression in her new job at London's National Gallery by mounting a small Caravaggio exhibition. Reggie is a bit of a romantic goose when it comes to men; even her appreciation of the painter's 17th-century altarpiece of a saint and an angel has carnal undertones. ("Whichever way that Angel swung he was a sexy creature.") But once she starts making trips to France to secure the Louvre's copy of the painting and finds yet another version in the country home of an old woman who frolicked with the Surrealists in her youth, the contrivances of the plot yield to the appeal of the setting. This part of France was the beating heart of the Resistance, and Brandon catches past and present in one frame, juxtaposing the picturesque beauty of the countryside with vestigial war memories and glimpses of the dark political clouds just beyond the horizon. The landscape of the American Southwest is so gorgeous it leaves some people speechless. It inspires others to write mysteries. Aimée and David Thurlo have a robust regional series going with Ella Clah, a Navajo Tribal Police officer whose investigations usually involve a standoff between tribal tradition and modern ways. In COYOTE'S WIFE (Forge/Tom Doherty, $24.95), the culture clash erupts with murderous attacks on a company trying to install a satellite phone system on the reservation. Despite hints of witchcraft and fierce vigilante groups that seem transparent plot misdirections, Clah is always good company, on and off the reservation. Christine Barber is new to the Southwest in the sense that THE REPLACEMENT CHILD (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) is her first novel. But she has a great feel for the territory and for the family connections that enforce its strong community bonds. Her heroine, Lucy Newroe, a Santa Fe newspaper editor who turns sleuth when someone murders an anonymous tipster, may also be new to the area, but her sensitivity to its social nuances makes her a welcome presence. Each of Karen Maitland's medieval travelers has a guilty secret, and one may be a murderer.
Kirkus Review
While Jack Taylor sits out a round, two homicidal NYPD cops stand in to sustain the Bruen mood. Jack Taylor, Bruen's series antihero who's losing his bitter battle with the bottle, has a walk-on here. But never mind about Taylor. His replacement, Matthew Patrick O'Shea, is engaged in his own losing battlewith goodness, as he indicates at the outset. Guard O'Shea, of the Irish national police, is certifiably psychotic and needs to be where the action is. New York's stratospheric level of bloodletting, in his view, lifts it above Dublin as a prospective base of operations. As part of an exchange program, the clever sicko manages to wangle a transfer from the Guards to the NYPD. There he meets and partners with Kurt Browski, a misogynistic thug in blue for whom police brutality amounts to a vocation. Like calls out to like, and for a while the two get along. Amazingly enough, there's a soft spot in Browski's iron soula beautiful, handicapped sister who's bound to become a target for O'Shea's atrocities. Will he pay for his vicious crimes? Bruen, poster boy for noir (Ammunition, 2007, etc.), keeps you guessing until the denouement. An unlovely tale impossible to put down. Readers asked at year's end to list the nastiest, most violent cop novels of 2008 will certainly remember this one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
He's so tough and cold you'd expect to see him on a platter at a greasy spoon. He prays he won't meet up with any beautiful women with swanlike necks because he's sure to strangle them with his green rosary. He's an Irish cop no less, on temporary assignment in New York. He's Matthew Patrick O'Shea, and in a typically Irish variation on the good cop-bad cop routine, he and his partner play bad cop-worse cop in the desperate city. When O'Shea meets his partner's beautiful but profoundly retarded sister, it's easy to guess the outcome, although, when it comes, it's even darker than you imagined. Even if it were offered, O'Shea would reject coaching in victim selection from Dexter Morgan (of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series), since he's all about in-your-face provocation. So is Bruen in this stand-alone thriller. The fare on offer at Chez Bruen features shards of spare sentences served up on lots of white space and presented with tons of attitude. Those who agree it's all in the presentation will be pleased, but those seeking meat and potatoes might be left wanting more. Suggested for public libraries as an example of first-rate nouvelle cuisine Ø la noir. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 7/08.]--Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
