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Ken Bruen's SANCTUARY, the latest in the Jack Taylor series, is a short, sharp knee to the groin. If you've followed this superlative but thoroughly bleak and unorthodox PI series, you'll know that Jack, a former Guard, has fallen lower than you'd imagine possible. The horrors of what he's seen have left their mark on him both physically and mentally. But hey, we didn't really expect that Jack would be able to make a clean start and move to Mexico, did we? As SANCTUARY opens, he's in a rented flat and providing what unorthodox support he can for his Guard friend Ridge, who is recovering from breast cancer. And he's back on the pop… When a letter arrives for him, couched in deceptively formal terms, Jack is pulled in to a fresh hell. For the correspondent, Benedictus, wants our hero to know that he has a shopping list of victims – two guards, one nun, one judge and a child. And he has chosen Jack as his confessor for his murderous spree. Jack really doesn't want to get involved as he struggles to keep himself together. But what tips it for him is the threat to kill a child. That's too close to home for Jack, who is struggling with the revelation that he might not have been responsible for the death of Serena, the young Down's Syndrome child who fell from a window while he was looking after her. In 220 intense pages, Bruen skewers unremittingly a man whose demons extend further than the bottom of a glass but who retains a bleak humanity in the face of it all. The setting for the books could only be Ireland – a nation haunted by the demons of the church and the ghosts of the saints and the scholars. It's a fast-changing Ireland, with the influx of eastern Europeans butting up against the older natives. In almost all of Bruen's work, black humour goes hand-in-hand with almost unbearable pain. And just like picking at a scab, it's impossible to ignore.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, November 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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