Once Were Cops by Ken Bruen

Once Were Cops by Ken Bruen

Ken Bruen's Once Were Cops melds the street poetry of Brooklyn and Dublin into a fast-paced, incomparable hard-boiled novel.

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.

Ken Bruen (born in 1970) is an American actor. 1951) is one of Ireland's most well-known crime novelists of the last two decades. He spent twenty-five years touring the world before starting to write in the mid-1990s, and he was born in Galway. Bruen served as an English instructor in South Africa, Japan, and South America, including a brief stint in a Brazilian jail. He has two long-running programs, one following a disgraced former police officer named Jack Taylor and the other starring Inspector Brant, a London police investigator.

Bruen's works are known for their dismal mood and terse style, as well as their piercing insight into the darker side of today's wealthy Ireland. His White Trilogy (1998-2000) and The Guards (2001), the Shamus Award-winning debut novel in the Jack Taylor series, are among his best-known works. Bruen continues to live and work in Galway with his wife and kid.