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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780312384401
ISBN number: 0312384408
Label: St. Martin's Minotaur
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Minotaur
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: October 28, 2008
Publishing house: St. Martin's Minotaur
Release Date: October 28, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 17508
Studio: St. Martin's Minotaur
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Product Description:
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.
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Rated by buyers -
The other reviews have covered pretty well the plot of Once Were Cops, so I'll leave that as it stands. Ken Bruen writes in a gritty, spare style that is a sort of minimalist art. Once Were Cops is my very first Bruen and I have to say it was an experience. With perhaps only one or two finely honed sentences per page, I had to shake my head over what he managed to convey with so few words. A major talent.
Having said that, I have to admit that this book was too dark for me. It actually made me more and more depressed as I got into it more deeply. That, too, is part of Bruen's genius in a way. I imagine if you're already a fan, you will appreciate this one but, again, I admit to needing a book with a lighter shade of noir.
Rated by buyers 
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With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, ONCE WERE COPS has broadened the definition of noir crime fiction. Ken Bruen always has gone his own dark way while exploring such matters; here, however, he takes a quantum leap into territory previously hinted at but nonetheless unexplored. The bad guys in this book are awful, but the good ones are worse, and the plot careens through the pages like a car with brake failure trying to negotiate the downward slope of a coastal highway chock-full of switchbacks.
ONCE WERE COPS picks up where Bruen's Jack Taylour series leaves off. Taylour even makes a brief appearance, thus effecting a continuity, however tangential, between that series and what is sure to be the beginning of a new one. Michael O'Shea --- "Shay" to his acquaintances --- is a member of The Guards, Ireland's police force. Through out-and-out blackmail, Shay is able to connive his way into a law enforcement exchange program between Ireland and the United States, thus becoming a member of New York's finest. Shay is not exactly welcome and seems initially to be a fish out of water, even as he makes contact with Irish expatriates.
However, his pairing with a veteran cop named Kebar is an epiphany. Kebar is badly twisted, a dangerous man who is owned by the Mob. The etiology of Kebar's sell-out is his mentally disabled sister; every dollar he earns, honestly and otherwise, goes to her care. His anger at life's injustice, combined with Shay's smoldering dark side, makes for a violent but effective crime-fighting tool. But when the mob tries to bring Shay into its fold, what little control he had breaks, and the fish out of water reveals itself as an amphibious piranha. Bruen gives his readers dribs and drabs of Shay's true nature, at times with such a subtle flourish that one needs to re-read a passage here and there in order to fully understand that whatever pre-conceived notion one had about him was totally wrong.
If Bruen had wanted to write a book about a really bad lieutenant in the making, he could have taken ONCE WERE COPS to its logical conclusion and wound up with an unforgettable stand-alone work. Alternatively, he could have used this novel as an introduction to a series about an extremely bent rogue cop on the streets of New York. Instead, Bruen goes a different way. Shay's involvement with an Irish woman named Nora and her subsequent brutal murder bring another element into the mix. Nora's brother Joe is a retired New York cop living in Florida. His sub rosa investigation into the killing reveals truths that are a shock to him, and to the reader. By the end, Joe's investigation is only beginning. Yet, given what has gone before, can even Joe be trusted?
ONCE WERE COPS is an amazing book, full of twists and turns and genre-busting events. Bruen pokes and probes at dark corners where even spiders refuse to tread. This is a work of brilliance, of nightmares, an instant classic that is sure to become a standard of noir fiction to which all others will be measured.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Rated by buyers -
Michael O'Shea is a calculating sociopathic Irishman, member of The Guards. He blackmails a powerful politician to be one of a group headed to the United States in exchange of American policemen in a trade agreement. He joins the NYPD and is paired with another sociopath, known as "K," and together they embark on a mad tear against all sorts of crime.
However, the partner has become a dirty cop to get enough cash to keep his incapacitated sister in an upscale facility. When his sister is found severely beaten, raped and comatose, K goes berserk. Meanwhile, Shea has been pursuing his own dark needs, while becoming a golden boy in the department. The combination is full of mayhem.
Written in a spare style, this noir tale is a must read not only for Bruen fans but all those who love a mystery. Recommended.
Rated by buyers -
Bruen does it again. This time there is no predicting where the plot will lead. His writing just gets better & better. I love that one character is from Ireland, the other, from New York. It's a read - YOU CAN'T PUT DOWN.
Rated by buyers -
There is magic in Ken Bruen's unadorned prose that is not easily identified. But once you've read it, you may wonder why it takes other authors paragraphs to conjure an image that Bruen knocks off in a single line, making it look easy. And once you've read him, you'll never mistake for anyone else in his uncluttered style telling of life on those mean streets outside the pages of "People Magazine."
"Once Were Cops" is classic Bruen: spare, lean, and brutal. In this talented writer's world, there is no grey and white - but that's not to mean it is ambiguous. There is simply the absence of white. Told in the very first person, Michael O'Shea - "Shea" - is a rookie "Guard" - a beat cop on Galway's cold and damp streets. He is also a sociopath subject to Jekyll and Hyde-like mood swings which transform this normally competent, if hard-edged, young policeman into a stalking serial killer who preys on young women. But Galway's streets bore quickly and the Guard's no-gun policy dampens Shea's fun, so when an opportunity for an exchange with the NYPD arises, through some mildly menacing extortion with a local pol, in jig time Shea is wearing the NYPD blue. He is teamed with "Kebar", a menace in his own right with enough attitude and baggage for an entire city precinct, hiding a mentally retarded adult sister in an exclusive nursing home courtesy of the local mafia overlord. But with the twin demons Shea and Kebar turned loose on the streets, New York City's "thugery" find themselves on the wrong end of the terror they're usually disbursing.
Bruen keeps his story lines simple and clean, and this is a fast read - easily polished off in a setting or two. But don't let the surface simplicity fool you, as the cagey Bruen is always holding a few twists up his sleeve as he feints and ducks his way to an ironically satisfying, though hardly redeeming, climax. Along the way, hardcore Bruen fans will catch Jack Taylor's cameo in Galway, and chuckle at the subliminal shout-out to crime writer-buddy Duane Swierczynski.
Look, I'll admit - Ken Bruen's brand of crime and style is not for everyone. Bruen's fatally flawed "heroes" - the deeply troubled Shea we meet here, or the alcoholic and anti-social Jack Taylour of previous Galway novels, or the boorish and brutal miscreant Sergeant Brant from the East London precinct series - will depress those looking for virtue and social redeeming value and neatly wrapped, made-for-TV conclusions. And Bruen's grey themes and unvarnished fatalism are probably not the stuff Dr. Phil would prescribe to his troubled flock. But for a slice of the noir and an insightful peak into the psyche of evil, none are better equipped to deliver the goods than the fiendishly brilliant Mr. Bruen. Bravo.
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