Ill-fated ex-cop Jack Taylor is broke and working nightshifts as a security guard when he receives an unexpected commission — find The Red Book, an infamous blasphemous text stolen from the Vatican archives. The thief, a rogue priest, is now believed to be hiding out in Galway. Despite Jack’s distaste for priests of any stripe, the money is just too good to turn down.

It won’t be hard for a man with Jack’s skills to track down the errant churchman, but Jack has underestimated The Red Book’s toxic lure and will be powerless to stem the wave of violence unleashed in its wake — a wave that will engulf Jack and all those around him.

BRADY’S BAD FUCKED

I wrote it on the bedroom wall, in yellow day-glo marker. Nice colour, blended well with the years of nicotine.

I haven’t taken my medication for the past week. If I couldn’t go a few days without the lithium, I was in deep shit. I’d gotten the job ten days earlier and it entailed a whack of pub-crawling. Booze and medication Is the worst of songs. Sing that!

A job of pure simplicity. Find a white girl in Brixton. Piece of cake. What I should have done is doubled my medication and lit a candle to St Jude — maybe a lot of candles.

Add in a lethal ex-con, an Irish builder obsessed with Gene Hackman, the biggest funeral Brixton has ever seen, and what you get is the Blues like they’ve never been sung before.

Jack Taylor, traumatised, bitter and hurling from his last case, has resolved to give up the finding business. However, he owes the local hard man a debt of honour and it appears easy enough: find “the Angel of the Magdalen” — a woman who helped the unfortunates incarcerated in the infamous laundry.

He is also hired by a whizz kid to prove that his father’s death was no accident. Jack treats both cases as relatively simple affairs. He becomes involved with a woman who might literally be the death of him, runs dangerously foul of the cops. He is finally clean and sober but the unfolding events will not only shake his sobriety but bring him as close to death as he could ever have imagined.

Born into a rough Brooklyn neighborhood, outsiders in their own families, Nick and Todd forge a lifelong bond that persists in the face of crushing loss, blood, and betrayal. Low-level wiseguys with little ambition and even less of a future, the friends become major players in the potential destruction of an international crime syndicate that stretches from the cargo area at Kennedy Airport to the streets of New York, Belfast, and Boston to the alleyways of Mexican border towns. Their paths are littered with the bodies of undercover cops, snitches, lovers, and stone-cold killers.