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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780312341442
ISBN number: 031234144X
Label: St. Martin's Minotaur
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Minotaur
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: July 25, 2006
Publishing house: St. Martin's Minotaur
Release Date: July 25, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 281169
Studio: St. Martin's Minotaur
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: a long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking lot attendant is rude to a series of customers, the “Manners Killer” makes sure that the subsequent thing either sees is the beginning of his own grisly end.
When he starts mailing letters to the Southeast London police squad, he’ll soon find out just how bad a man’s manners can get. The Southeast is dominated by the perpetual sneer of one Inspector Brant, and while he might or might not agree with the killer’s cause and can even forgive his tactics to some degree, Brant is just ornery enough to employ his trademark brand of amoral, borderline-criminal policing to the hunt for the Manners Killer. For if there’s one thing that drives the incomparable inspector, it’s the unshakeable conviction that if anyone is going to be getting away with murder on his patch, it’ll be Brant himself, thank you very much.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
If you are a Jack Taylour fan, Bruen has left the alcohol slosh of Dublin and moved to a horrific London of cops who will do most anything to make a pinch. The prose is terse and never fails to bring out the scene it attempts to invoke, even if it is classic noir. The reader will have to decide if the methods justify the result. Bruen gives you that opportunity in a stylistic and entertaining manner.
Ron Lealos author of Don't Mean Nuthin'
Rated by buyers 
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I liked the swift pace. I liked the swift-jab sentences and once or twice laughed out loud. There are a few brilliant scenes and Bruen really packs a lot of plot into a short book. But I missed the characters--they all seemed light and airy. They were more an attitude than a real person, to me. Bruen does not hold your hand on the plot points. Also, a bit of stretch to figure the serial killer here could pull off his "activities" so easily and that Brant, on the other side, could be quite so brutal. A fun ride but if you're looking for depth, steer clear.
Rated by buyers -
I really enjoyed Ken Bruen's, The Guards, in which I met Irish ex-cop Jack Taylour for the very first time. I was taken with Bruen's unusual style and his love for all the classic crime novelists who preceded him (my thoughts on The Guards) so I looked forward to reading something else from him.
Bruen has two crime series going at the moment, one series of four novels featuring Jack Taylour and another of three Inspector Brant novels set in London. Calibre, from the Inspector Brandt series, largely maintains the tone and style that I enjoyed in The Guards, but it didn't work as well for me as a reader this second time around.
The sparsely written novel centers around the "Manners Killer," a man who has taken it upon himself to rid southeast London of as many belligerently rude people as he possibly can. Unfortunately for them, he decides that the best way to do that is to kill them in what he, at first, hopes will appear to be nothing more than regrettable accidents. Soon enough, the killer decides that he would like some credit for his good deeds and starts to mail taunting letters to the Southeast London police squad. That's when Inspector Brandt decides to put a stop to all the nonsense.
As in The Guards, the main thread of his plot soon becomes relatively secondary to Ken Bruen; his novels are more about characters and atmosphere than they are about plot. The Southeast London police squad is manned by an assortment of characters who have more in common with the criminals they confront everyday than with the public's general concept of what makes a good and honest policeman. Brant himself, an Ed McBain want-to-be, remains a successful street cop only by playing by the rules of the street and shows little concern for the law he has sworn to uphold. And the cops with whom he works everyday, both male and female, are so much like him that any differences they have are only a matter of degree.
I think that Calibre is a worthy tribute to Dashiell Hammett but I soon started to wish that Bruen was not so intent on out-Hammetting Hammett and that he would put a bit more meat on the bones of his characters. I would like to know more about them than Bruen tells us, cops and robbers alike.
Rated by buyers 
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It's impossible to categorize Ken Bruen. His jarring, disjointed chronicles of crime follow no convention, and while his respect for the masters of pulp fiction:
McBain
Chandler
Thompson
is faithfully imbedded in his prose, Bruen mimics none of them. His style and his formulae are all his own:
Fresh
Brutal
In your face
No apologies
"Calibre" is the latest Bruen masterpiece from Hell. A serial killer is on the loose, reaping vengeance on the rude, the inconsiderate, the boorish clods that spread their venom often and indiscriminately. The killer, "Ford", follows Jim Thompson's classic, "The Killer Inside Me", like it were the holy writ, a student of CSI dispatching his random and manner-less victims with vicious and intelligent efficiency. The perfect criminal - or so he thinks...
Back to crack the case is the incorrigible sergeant Brant of the Southeast London police, a character as unconventional and unique as Bruen himself. Brant's disregard for authority is legendary, but Dirty Harry is perfectly prissy compared to Brant's distain for rules and the law, which he routinely breaks with impunity. And while Brant's superiors would like to see him on the other side of the bars, he keeps his tracks covered while solving crime with methods guaranteed to keep the self-appointed watchdogs of politically correct police procedure in an uncomfortable state of apoplexy.
Take note: Ken Bruen and Sergeant Brant are not for all tastes. If you're looking for a clean police procedural with cool crime scene forensics, intricate plots, and a tidy conclusion, Bruen's rapid-fire dialog and sketchy story development may leave you wanting. Bruen, like his anti-hero Brant, are more suited to writing with a Molotov cocktail than a typewriter. But if you're looking for a new definition of noir, of grit and reality and grey humour that is told without apology that could not care less who or what it offends, well, what are you waiting for?
Rated by buyers -
This is the latest in Bruen's Southeast London series, and, no surprise, he again delivers the goods. As dependable as the Ramones or AC-DC in their prime, Bruen's series of ultraviolent "police procedurals" never fails to satisfy. These novels, featuring the ever charismatic Sargeant Brant, are deceptively simple on the surface, but Bruen's terse ultra-honed prose is more like poetry in disguise. On the surface you have basically a fabulously entertaining Road Runner cartoon or 2-minute punk rock song. But read them carefully and hear how the language sings. Not as dark or overtly existentialist as his Galway novels, these little gems are like nothing before them. No one else's writing is this hip, this smart and this good all at the same time. A 21st century Irish Jim Thompson with the writing chops of a poet. Think the young Van Morrison wired on crank fronting the Sex Pistols...
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