Dark heart of Galway

Crime: When Ken Bruen's 2004 crime novel The Guards was shortlisted for four American Crime Awards and then won a prestigious Shamus award, it sent us crime readers raiding the shops for the low-profile Galway writer's books. It also meant that Bantam took him on and Priest, his new Jack Taylor novel, is his first for that international publishing house.

The edgy, black-humoured Priest begins during Taylor's last days of a long stay in a Galway psychiatric hospital where he's been trying to come to terms with his responsibility for the death of a child, the daughter of close friends. Once released from care, Taylor is back on the streets of Galway, a city unrecognisable from its Discover Ireland image.

The pubs aren't fun palaces full of cultured types and singsongs, they're dingy kips peopled by hopeless drunks and the economic boom has fuelled a money-grabbing selfishness that has changed the city into an anonymous, hard place. It's an Ireland where sex scandals have knocked the clergy off their moral high ground, and when Taylor is approached to solve the murder of Father Joyce, a paedophile whose severed head is found in the confessional, he uncovers a harrowing trail of ruined lives and official duplicity.

Loner protagonists with a police background, a problem with drink and a history of disastrous personal relationships are crime novel cliches but in creating Taylor, Bruen has driven that cliche down to a deeper, darker place. Doing what he calls "white knuckle sobriety" Taylor antagonises everyone he meets - this isn't a gumshoe with a heart of gold behind an abrasive exterior, he's a man struggling against personal demons that have sapped any positive emotions he might have had.

Despite his better instincts he takes on a sidekick, Cody, a young man who has seen one too many cheesy private detective TV shows and whose character provides much of the light relief in the book. There's also Taylor's on-going relationship with Ban Garda Ridge, which is as abrasive and barbed as ever, and she provides at least one key sub plot in this tightly structured, compelling book. You don't want to meet Jack Taylor in person, ever, but if you're a big crime fan, you do want to read every book he features in.

Priest By Ken Bruen Bantam, 290pp. €10.99

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist