The Shamus Award winner recounts his famous PI's origin"They don't come much tougher than Ken Bruen's Irish roughneck, Jack Taylor" (The New York Times Book Review).In this short work, Edgar Award finalist Ken Bruen—"a Celtic Dashiell Hammett"—takes us deeper into his character Jack Taylor, formerly of Ireland's police force, the Garda Síochána, now a living-on-the-edge private detective (The Philadelphia Inquirer)."Jack, as fans of this long-running series know all too well, has a gift for blarney, for plain speaking, for poetic melancholy, for downing shots of Jameson's [sic] without ice, and for pregnant one-word paragraphs." —Kirkus Reviews"Bruen's storytelling style, a stream-of-consciousness mix of prose and verse, strips away Galway's tourist-board facade and offers a darkly comic social commentary." —Booklist"The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel." —The Irish Times"[Taylor's] voice is wry and bittersweet, but somehow always hopeful." —The Seattle Times