'American Skin' is, as far as I can tell, a standalone in Ken Bruen's catalog. He's a respected Irish mystery/police novelist who has written a couple highly regarded series. American Skin begins in Ireland and flashes back on occasion, but its setting is America and it doesn't get any more American than NYC, Vegas, and Tucson.

American Skin starts with a bang as an IRA-aligned gang is involved in a bank heist that doesn't end well for one of the criminals, leaving a bunch of money in the hands of Stephen Blake. Blake has a girlfriend who's helping him strategize how to keep the money and they decide America would be a good place to do it. Complicating things are a psycho redneck who manages to cross paths with some of Blake's contacts and a the 3rd member of the bank heist group, also a psycho who wants his cut of the money pretty badly.

The action travels back and forth in time, moving in the present day mostly westward from New York as Blake meanders his way to Tucson. On the way he manages to cheat on his girl who's still back in Ireland multiple times, get seriously messed up on drugs and alcohol, married in an Elvis-themed chapel in Vegas (and quickly divorced thereafter), and cleaned up in time to make it to Tucson just as the 2 psychos arrive. Lots of violence, sex, and debauchery along the way add to the fun.

Bruen's a fine writer with a good ear for dialogue. He does a nice job evoking the respective atmospheres of the cities Blake inhabits and his accounts of the activities of the redneck psycho are impressive. I can't say I was a fan of the plot- I liked the way he flashed back and forth to expose various aspects of the history of the different folks involved in the story, but there seemed to me to be a bit too much meandering, especially in the Las Vegas sections, that didn't contribute much to the story. Otherwise, American Skin is a nice, violent little novel. ( )

I enjoyed the previous Bruen book that I read, The Guards, so was expecting a lot from this one. In the event I was somewhat disappointed: American Skin enthralled me a lot less than I'd anticipated, not (I concluded) because of the storytelling, which is trademark Bruen, but because there were -- and I know this sounds odd -- too many psychopaths in the tale. Stephen Blake and his best pal Tommy pull off a bank heist in Ireland with an Ulster IRA psychopath called Stapleton, who climaxes the heist by killing Tommy. Blake flees for the US, leaving financial-whizkid girlfriend Siobhan to launder the money preparatory to joining him, with it, in the US. But Stapleton has other ideas. In the US, Blake, who himself is not without psychopathic tendencies, guiltily boffs the psychopathic nympho wife, Sherry, of the psychopathic petty gang boss who used to be Tommy's friend, then offs the friend and flees again, now for Tucson. Sherry pursues, hooking up with another psychopath, sadistic serial killer Dade . . . Are you beginning to realize why my disbelief failed to stay fully suspended? ( )

The first book I've read by Ken Bruen and really a taster for me to help me decide whether to pursue the Jack Talor series which I will probably now do because after this I'm certainly interested to read more as this was a stylish noir novel that had characters packed with menace and a Pulp Fiction style storyline that had the characters crossing over into storylines that were previously unrelated. The mixture of American and Irish characters and settings works well for me and everything is conveyed with a sense of realism that is sometimes lacking in lesser novels. ( )

http://www.bookspotcentral.com/2006/12/book-review-american-skin/ ( )