A story collection includes the title novella, in which an octogenarian retired judge's musings on his life are interrupted by police updates about his murder later that afternoon.

“The Godfather of the modern Irish crime novel . . . writes in machine gun fashion . . . reminiscent of the work of Raymond Chandler and Peter Cheyenne.” —The Irish Times
 
In Green Hell, Bruen’s dark angel of a protagonist has hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him; he has given up battling his...

"New Yorker Tara Meehan's first trip to Galway may be her last ... Tara never imagined her introduction to Ireland like this - carrying her mam's ashes to honor her final request: Tell Johnny I'm sorry ... Take me home. She's never met her mam's estranged brother, Johnny Meehan, who owns an architectural salvage business in Galway. Although Tara is immediately charmed by the medieval city, the locals seem wary of strangers and a gypsy warns her that...

Private investigator Jack Taylor confronts an evil coterie named Headstone, who have committed a series of random, insane, violent crimes in Galway, Ireland.

Seems impossible, but Jack Taylor is sober-off booze, pills, powder, and nearly off cigarettes, too. The main reason he's been able to keep clean: his dealer's in jail, which leaves Jack without a source. When that dealer calls him to Dublin and asks a favor in the soiled, sordid visiting room of Mountjoy Prison, Jack wants to tell him to take a flying leap. But he doesn't-can't, because the dealer's sister is dead, and the guards have called it "death...

"When Dr. Emma Sweeney stumbles across the victim of a hit-and-run outside Galway University early one morning, she calls her boyfriend, Detective Cormac Reilly, bringing him first to the scene of a murder that would otherwise never have been assigned to him. The dead girl is carrying an ID that will put this crime at the center of a scandal--her card identifies her as Carline Darcy, heir apparent to Darcy Therapeutics, Ireland's most successful pharmaceutical...

Struggling to remain sober and overcome a debt to a local thug, Jack Taylor accepts a job tracking down a woman who once befriended the thug's mother, an assignment that proves increasingly challenging and dangerous.

"An opposites-attract romantic dramedy about a shy, demisexual Irish mortician who must marry by his 35th birthday to keep his beloved family business, and the Texan widow escaping her past who moves in next door"--