London Boulevard (Hardcover)

I read Bruen's "The Guards" last year and then followed that up with "The White Trilogy," both literary journeys well below the surface of the pool where the bottom feeders live and ply their trade.

Mitchell serves three years for aggravated assault in a London prison. One imagines almost a sullen Steve McQueen-like character, Mitchell never had a recollection of how the crime actually happened since he's a black out binge drinker. We are left to imagine that it was the circumstantial testimony of the victim and Mitchell's good mate, Billy Norton, that get him the sentence.

He gets out and tries to go straight but there's an entire cadre of people who keep setting up roadblocks for him. Billy meets him after his release and wants him to go into the loan shark collection business with him. Briony, his lovely sister, keeps telling him that she and her husband Frank will meet him for dinner, but Frank's been dead for 5 years. And Lillian, the aging actress who hires him to be a handyman on her enormous estate, wants him to be full service handyman. All this while he finds true love in Aisling, who loves him and wants to marry him, and in all of this confusion . . . he does too.

Ken Bruen is like James Crumley, high praise for both. There are no sensitive remarks between buddies and it's sure not written for the movies. It's a stark, tough life. Not everybody makes it and those that do are never the same.

The publishing is of poor quality, with occasional improper spacing, incorrect punctuation, missing periods, reverse quotation marks. But the quality of the work is extremely good. 5 stars. Easily 7 or 8. Larry Scantlebury

LONDON BOULEVARD is one of the best books I have read this spring. Tough, gritty, written in an almost diary-like style, this is one of the few novels I truly had trouble putting down. I was sitting up in bed at one in the morning thinking, "Just a couple more pages, that's all," and before I knew it a couple more had turned into several more chapters. Ken Bruen has created a sordid tale of love and violence that is criminally easy to read. His characters aren't particularly loveable, but they aren't supposed to be. His pacing, plotting, dialogue all sizzle and leave the reader hungering for more right down to the slam bang finish.

My one complaint with this book, which has nothing to do with the author and his work, is the publishing press's horrible job. Periods are missing, commas and quotes are backwards, at one point a whole ten to twelve line blank chunk has been inserted in the text, the list goes on. I cannot believe a publishing company, even a small one called Do Not, could get away with this sort of mess.

In short, if you like hard boiled, fast paced, and tough talking little novels, LONDON BOULEVARD is a winner I couldn't recommend more highly.