JACK TAYLOR NOVELS BRANT NOVELS Ammunition Calibre Vixen Blitz The McDead Taming the Alien A White Arrest CRIME NOVELS MAX & ANGELA NOVELS CALIBRE US In Bruen's new pulp-inspired novel featuring Inspector Brant, the Southeast London Police Squad is plagued by a serial murderer who's determined to give his victims a lesson in manners. Taking a cue from Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, the "Manners Killer" believes that anyone who behaves rudely in public (e.g., verbally abuses a store clerk, slaps a child) is fair game. He soon finds that he's no match for Brant, Bruen's amoral, sociopathic brute of a detective ("He was heavily built with a black Irish face that wasn't so much lived in as squatted upon"). While his methods may be questionable, Brant gets results, and we find ourselves secretly cheering him on. Meanwhile, Brant is writing his first crime novel, Calibre, and aspires to become the English Joseph Wambaugh. Of course, he doesn't let the fact that he can't write deter him; Brant just nicks the stories from his cop buddy Porter Nash. Buy the book from Amazon.com or an independent bookstore. PRAISE "...superb....Bruen's furious hard-boiled prose, chopped down to its trademark essence, never fails to astonish."    —Publishers Weekly "So many books are so much like so many other books that it's always a delight to encounter a writer with an utterly distinctive voice. The prize-winning Irish novelist Ken Bruen is such a writer. The words that best describe him, besides original, are outrageous and hilarious..."    —Washington Post "CALIBRE is the sixth entry in the series that began in 1998. This is one of those books that once you read it, you immediately will have to search out and buy all the other books featuring Brant and his fellow constables. It's so enjoyable and fast-paced that if you're like me, you'll want to catch up with everything you missed.... Bruen is a terrific writer and he might have created the police procedural for the early 21st century. Remember that McBain started his series in the more innocent and optimistic 1950s. Bruen paints a picture of an existential world where sometimes really bad guys will do things for good reasons and basically good guys do really bad things. But hope never dies."    —BookReporter.com (read the full review) "Bruen is so prolific that there is mounting evidence he could supply his own book-of-the-month club. It doesn't seem to affect his quality, though. Bruen is so stinting on description that it's hard to keep some of them straight—but the completely corrupt, satanically funny Brant probably could carry the whole thing on his shoulders. Here's to the next Bruen-of-the-Month."    —Booklist