AMMUNITION
Ken Bruen
St. Martin’s Minotaur
Mystery
ISBN-10: 0312341458
ISBN-13: 9780312341459

Ireland is known for producing some of the greatest writers in Western literature. But few would consider Joyce or Yeats or Shaw to be mystery or crime writers. The prolific Galway writer, Ken Bruen, is an award-winning mystery author who has been called the “Celtic Dashiell Hammett.” Bruen is changing the way Americans think about Irish writers by producing some of the best mysteries on the market today.

AMMUNITION is the seventh entry in Bruen’s police procedural series set in London. It does not disappoint. Bruen continues to take the procedural format made famous by Ed McBain in his 87th Precinct series and turn it on its ear. The result is a delightful book that is impossible to put down. This is a story about cold-blooded murder, vigilante violence, illicit drug use, law breaking, backbiting and hatred in South East London. And that’s just among the cops.

The novel starts with the attempted assassination of the most famous cop in the Met, the totally amoral and often brutal Sergeant Brant, who is referred to by both friends and foes alike as “an animal” or “the devil.” When word spreads that he has been shot, the first reaction by all is the same: “Is he dead?” This is followed by disappointed silence when they hear the answer. Besides cops, those arriving at the hospital to stand vigil for Brant include “a whole gaggle of them (hookers).”

Brant is that type of guy. His closest thing to a friend on the force, Porter Nash, the gay diabetic, is assigned to find the shooter. Nash realizes: “Thing was, almost every single case, with Brant’s unique style of policing, gave rise to a suspect. It was fast becoming…who wouldn’t want to shoot him?”

To make matters worse, Brant’s assailant takes to calling harried Chief Inspector Roberts, taunting him and promising to do the job right the next time. And a new sick social phenomena known as “Happy Slapping” plagues London’s streets. Youngsters walk up to strangers, slap them across the face and record their stunned reaction on a cell phone. The results end up on the Internet.

Newly promoted Sergeant Falls is ordered to go down to Kennington and catch a "happy slapper." As the Metropolitan’s sole black female cop, Falls is widely hated not for her gender or race but for her past screwups as a cop. And it turns out she passed the sergeant’s exam on her final shot with the help of Brant, who stole the exam for her. But Fall’s past is about to catch up with her, big time.

Bruen writes of Falls: “The past was not so much another country as a minefield of horror.” A big part of that horror is a “nasty, psycho” serial killer named Angie, with whom Falls once had a brief lesbian fling. Needless to say, Angie could bring her world crashing down in an instant. And now Angie is somehow out of prison and stalking Falls.

Then there is disgraced Constable McDonald, bitter, drug-addled and stuck guarding a shopping center in the freezing cold. When he randomly bloodies a defiant teen, McDonald comes to the attention of a group of elderly vigilantes looking to take back their neighborhood from street hoodlums.

As if all this were not enough chaos, there appears on the scene a Yank. He is L.M. Wallace, a “terrorism expert” sent by American officials to assist the London police in looking for bombers. In Wallace, Bruen has created a character every bit as dangerous as Brant on his worst day. Wallace is a “dark side” figure who would scare the daylights out of Dick Cheney.

And, of course, there is still the somewhat shaken Brant, who makes a miraculous and quick recovery from his wounds. Bruen writes of Brant: “Yeah, fine, he was of Irish descent, he knew the painkiller that never failed. Tore open his drinks cabinet, nigh splintering the wood, grabbed the bottle of Jameson, a twenty-five year old beauty he’d been saving, twisted off the cap as if he was twisting the neck of some bugger, got a lethal measure poured into a heavy Waterford tumbler and drank deep, waiting for the magic to light his belly.” And that, along with the help of one of his hooker friends, put Brant right back in the game. As Nash observes, “A focused Brant was a very dangerous animal.”

Bruen moves the various plot lines along at a brisk pace. Much like the master of the procedural, McBain, Bruen can make his characters become so involved in another plot line that they forget momentarily the danger they face in their own. And like McBain, he can make you laugh at human foibles and absurdity one moment and then bring you right back into the random terror of modern life the next. Bruen writes of one character, unjustly set up by Falls: “He’d been walking along, his mind preoccupied by minor irritations. Oh, God, what he wouldn’t give to have them back…Then f---, like hell opened up and Armageddon hit him.”

This is a perfect description of noir. Bruen is a master of noir, taking that very American genre and putting a unique Irish twist on it. Books like AMMUNITION are quick, fun reads, excursions to the dark side of the street. If you haven’t read them, then search out the entire series.

In true noir tradition these books have something to say about the modern world. They tell us that things are rarely what they seem on the surface. And at the end of the day, the world often contains more gray than black and white. Occasionally, AMMUNITION points out, the darkness wins out and the bullets find their target. But the struggle never ends.

   --- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

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