Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Guards | 2001 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 2 | The Killing of the Tinkers | 2002 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 3 | The Magdalen Martyrs | 2003 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 4 | The Dramatist | 2004 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 5 | The Dead Room | 2005 | Ken Bruen | N/A |
| 6 | Priest | 2006 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 7 | Cross | 2007 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 8 | Sanctuary | 2008 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 9 | The Devil | 2010 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 10 | Headstone | 2011 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 11 | Purgatory | 2013 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 12 | Green Hell | 2015 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 13 | The Emerald Lie | 2016 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 14 | The Ghosts of Galway | 2017 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 15 | In the Galway Silence | 2018 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 16 | Galway Girl | 2019 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 17 | A Galway Epiphany | 2020 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 18 | Galway Confidential | 2024 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 19 | Galway’s Edge | 2025 | Ken Bruen | Buy |
| 20 | The Dead Roomwas a limited edition story of which only 150 were released. | - | Ken Bruen | N/A |
The Jack Taylor series is Ken Bruen’s defining work, twenty books following a former member of An Garda Siochana who was thrown off the force and reinvented himself as a private investigator in Galway. Taylor drinks too much, reads too much, and keeps getting pulled into cases that leave him worse off than before. The Guards (2001) introduced him, and the series continued through Galway’s Edge (2025).
The Galway setting is central to the books. As the city changed over twenty-five years, Taylor changed with it, though never fast enough and never willingly. The later titles emphasize the location: The Ghosts of Galway, In the Galway Silence, Galway Girl, A Galway Epiphany, and Galway Confidential all anchor themselves in the city that Taylor can never quite leave.