GREEN HELL By Ken Bruen Mysterious Press, 304 pages, $26
Ken Bruen’s new book is the 13th in the Irish writer’s series featuring Jack Taylor, Galway’s only private eye. By far the sketchiest Taylor novel, it often boils down to catalogues of Taylor’s bar bills and lists of his preferences in entertainment. Favourite television shows: Barney Miller (early TV), Breaking Bad (later TV). Character from fiction he would most like to be: Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens. Murder wanders into events, the solution to which Taylor mostly botches. Entertaining as this self-indulgent stuff is in stretches, it still represents Bruen at half speed.