Declan Hughes

Currently Reading - City of Lost Girls, Declan Hughes

Submitted by Karen on

Book Title: 
City of Lost Girls
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes

Look how grown up I'm being about this alphabetical challenge.  At least for this book - next up I'm going to blithely break my own rules.  In the meantime - the latest from one of my favourite series.

From the Blurb:

Added to MtTBR - City of Lost Girl, Declan Hughes

Submitted by Karen on

Book Title: 
City of Lost Girls
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes

This one is easy - I now exactly why it was recently added to MtTBR - because I just love the Ed Loy books.  Well, I was less keen on The Dying Breed but that's relative to the way that I really liked the others (The Wrong Kind of Blood / The Colour of Blood / All The Dead Voices).

Needless to say these books are on my "get as soon as available" list.

Which I'll grant you is an increasingly long list.

ALL THE DEAD VOICES - Declan Hughes

Author Information
Book Title: 
All the Dead Voices
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes
Author's Home Country: 
Ireland
ISBN: 
9781848540682
Series: 
Ed Loy
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Sub Genre: 
Private Detective
Location: 
Dublin
Publisher: 
John Murray
Year of Publication: 
2009

Ed Loy has made some changes.  He has moved into a flat in Dublin's city centre, leaving the family home behind.  Maybe now he can break free from the ghosts of his past.

But when a fifteen-year-old murder case is re-opened, Loy is hired by the victim's daughter to investigate the suspects ignored by the first investigation:  a rich property developer, an ex-IRA man and Loy's least favourite sociopath, George Halligan.

Book Review: 

Grant me a moment here, but Ed Loy is well and truly back and I'm more than a little bit happy about that!  ALL THE DEAD VOICES is a really tense, investigative novel with a just a touch of the thriller about it.  The action is swift, the tension carefully ramped up and the plot nicely complicated.  The details are carefully laid out, allowing the reader to keep up, sort it out, decide for themselves, pick up the clues along the way.  Provided you're concentrating.

In 1980 two IRA men are hiding beside a roadway, ready to detonate the bomb destined to kill a hated judge.  Just as well this is a carefully planned operation, as the two killers do not get on - much to the amusement of their colleagues.

Current day and Ed is moving on, by moving house, clearing his head, getting his edge back.  He's doing a little low key watching of an up and coming footballer - Paul Delany.  His half-brother Dessie's a bit suspicious that Paul might be dealing heroin on the side, and living in Greece there's not much he can do about it himself.  A threatening moment at a football match and Paul's reaction reassures Loy something's going on; the couple of young hoods that have a go at him in an alley late at night reinforce that.  But Loy had just left them a bit bruised and battered - their turning up dead is definitely not down to him, even if the police aren't so convinced.

Meanwhile, Loy is approached by Anne Fogarty, who thinks that the police have got the wrong man for the killing of her father, fifteen years ago.  Anne's father had been a revenue inspector, involved in the investigation of some very dodgy people:  Jack Cullen, ex-IRA now gang leader; Bobby Doyle, ex-IRA now property developer, and George Halligan - Loy's least favourite sociopath.  Oh, and because it never rains but it pours, something is brewing in the Cullen camp and Comerford is convinced that somebody is leaking information about drug smuggling to the police, and he wants Ed to find out who.

One of the things that I really like about the Ed Loy books is that the plots are crowded, complicated and not always made up of obviously intersecting threads. ALL THE DEAD VOICES has that lightening pace, as well as the swirling list of links, possible links, gangs, impending violence, past violence and secrets.  It's that wheedling out of secrets that Ed Loy does best of all, well that along with juggling all the goings on, surviving the occasional beating up and reluctant, but efficient, dishing out of the occasional thumping.  Ed's style of investigating is very much the "prod something a bit and wait for the ripples to spread" methodology, but it's effective, partly because he's not too afraid to prod where others may not dare, and he's well aware of the circles in which he is moving.  

After being slightly less enthusiastic about the last Ed Loy outing, ALL THE DEAD VOICES is not only a return to the standard of the first books in the series, it has a touch of the moving on about it.  Loy's not standing still, and neither should readers - regardless of whether you're already a fan, or this will be a new encounter for you.

The earlier books in the series are:

The Wrong Kind of Blood
The Colour of Blood
The Dying Breed

Currently Reading - All the Dead Voices, Declan Hughes

Submitted by Karen on

Book Title: 
All the Dead Voices
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes

This is the 4th book in the Ed Loy series - a book I've been very much looking forward to.

From the Blurb:

Ed Loy has made some changes.  He has moved into a flat in Dublin's city centre, leaving the family home behind.  Maybe now he can break free from the ghosts of his past.

But when a fifteen-year-old murder case is re-opened, Loy is hired by the victim's daughter to investigate the suspects ignored by the first investigation; a rich property developer, an ex-IRA man and Loy's least favourite sociopath, George Halligan.

THE DYING BREED - Declan Hughes

Author Information
Book Title: 
The Dying Breed
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes
Author's Home Country: 
Ireland
ISBN: 
9780719568428
Series: 
Ed Loy
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Publisher: 
John Murray
Year of Publication: 
2008

Find a missing man with a single name?  It's not much to go on, even for the best private eye.  One name is all Ed Loy is given by the family of a prominent racehorse trainer FX Tyrrell, and he has no choice but to take the case.
 
Book Review: 

THE DYING BREED is the third book in the Irish PI Ed Loy series from Declan Hughes, Ed being an Irishman who went home after living in the US for many years.  A broken marriage and the tragic death of his young daughter are events that shaped him there, but his childhood in Ireland shaped him even more firmly, and a large number of the characters that he works with on a daily basis are connections from the past.  But he's a PI (in a place where that's still a bit of a novelty) and he's ready for his next case (and pay cheque), so he takes on a very odd investigation in THE DYING BREED.  Father Vincent Tyrrell wants him to find a missing man, although there's not a lot for Ed to go on.  It takes him into the world of horse racing, and a rapid build up of dead bodies and family skeletons.
 
Ed Loy is the very epitome of the classic Private Investigator.  A loner, a tough man, a man who always manages to pick the wrong woman, Ed's very reminiscent of so many of the well-known PI's of the genre, although with a very Irish twist.  There's a constant tension between Ed and the Catholic Church - very much a love / hate relationship, complicated in earlier books by his difficult relationship with his very devout mother - and her confessor priest.   
 
There's something not quite right about the early stages of THE DYING BREED, which made the first half of the book a struggle.  It was hard to get involved, hard to be engaged; the story just seemed to float along with no connection to the society in which it was happening.  The long-term characters held up their parts fairly well, but there were too many new entrants - part of the horse world - who were underdone.  The action does ramp up later in the book, and things do get more interesting, but the resolution lands on the reader, told as opposed to revealed or shown, leaving the reader feeling rather short-changed.  
 
If you haven't read any of the Ed Loy series, you'd be well served starting out with the first two books - they give you a lot of background to why Ed is where he is (which is just nice to know, not necessary).  For this avowed fan of the first two books, THE DYING BREED simply wasn't as good as them.
 

THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD - Declan Hughes

Author Information
Book Title: 
The Wrong Kind of Blood
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes
Author's Home Country: 
Ireland
ISBN: 
9780719567469
Series: 
Ed Loy
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Sub Genre: 
Private Detective
Publisher: 
John Murray
Year of Publication: 
2007

Ed Loy hasn't been back to Dublin for twenty years.  But his mother has died, and he has returned to bury her.  Loy realises that the world waiting for him is very different from the one he left behind.
 
When an old school friend asks him to investigate the disappearance of her husband, Loy reluctantly agrees.  And suddenly in the Dublin where he grew up - among the Georgian houses, Victorian castles and modern villas of Castlehill - Loy finds himself thrown into a world of organised crime, long-hidden secrets, corruption and murder.
Book Review: 

Okay, so Ed Loy is a bit of a lone wolf character.  He's also obviously been endowed with some sort of minor super-powers.  You know the sort.  No matter how much of a kicking he takes, no matter how much battering, beating, brawling and bashing goes on, Ed keeps on keeping on.  He might limp a bit occasionally.  He might grimace when a recent scar stings, but there's a job to be done and Ed's going to do that job.  Of course this sort of character can get right up the reader's nose unless they have something else - that personality or style - that means you can forgive the minor super-human powers and just read the book.  Ed's definitely one of those blokes for this reader at least.
 
It doesn't hurt that this is a complex tale.  After 20 years Ed comes back to a Dublin that might have changed a lot, to people that haven't.  Meeting up with old friends and acquaintances at his mother's funeral, the fabulous opening paragraph of this book happens - "The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband".  That has got to be one of the all time great openings, and luckily the tone and style that it sets remains through the book.  
 
Ed finds Linda's husband, and along the way he finds out a lot about his father, his mother and the ties that bind them all back through the family lines.  Typically Irish in that the family loyalties and enmities that go back generations, are faithfully carried forward to the current day; typically hard-boiled thriller in that it portrays a stark brutality, beautifully balanced by a central character that's as tough as nails and fragile as glass all at the same time.
 
THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD is the first Ed Loy book, the second book is THE COLOUR OF BLOOD which I was lucky enough to read first.  WRONG KIND OF BLOOD fills in where Ed has come from a lot, but both books stand alone and work as a series if you're lucky enough to get the order right.
 
 

Currently Reading - The Wrong Kind of Blood, Declan Hughes

Submitted by Karen on

Book Title: 
The Wrong Kind of Blood
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes

This is actually the first Ed Loy book - I read the second, The Colour of Blood a while ago and really liked it - so I've been meaning to get to this first book for a while.

"The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband.  Now she was lying dead on her living-room floor, and the howl of a police siren echoed through the surrounding hills."

COLOUR OF BLOOD - Declan Hughes

Author Information
Book Title: 
Colour of Blood
Author Name: 
Declan Hughes
Author's Home Country: 
Ireland
ISBN: 
9780719568411
Series: 
Ed Loy
Categorisation
Category: 
Crime Fiction
Sub Genre: 
Private Detective
Publisher: 
Hachette Livre
Year of Publication: 
2007
Book Review: 

THE COLOUR OF BLOOD is the second Ed Loy novel by Declan Hughes, the first being The Wrong Kind of Blood, published in 2006.
 
Ed Loy is a Private Investigator in current day Dublin, Ireland - a place that's part gritty, poor, desperate and part rich, privileged, twisted. Shane Howard is a Dublin dentist, and the son of Dr John Howard, a pillar of Dublin Irish Society, famous in the local area, with a legacy that is maintained by his family. Shane's 19 year old daughter Emily has gone missing and now he is getting blackmail threats and sexually explicit photographs of her - Shane is not sure if she's being abused or if she's a willing participant.
 
What starts off as a fairly straight-forward job locating the missing Emily and tracking down the source of the photographs rapidly gets more and more complicated as digging around in the Howard family starts to reveal a lot of skeletons in everyone's closets.
 
There are a few reasons why you'd wonder if this was a good book or not. There's the tortured, embittered, lost, hard-drinking PI in Ed but for many reasons he may teeter on the edge of the cliché, but he never quite tips over. There's the wealthy, seemingly successful Howard family, rotten to the core with all sorts of secrets and tacky goings on, but stereotypical in many ways, however there's something engaging, human, interesting in many of the members of that family.
 
There are a lot of subplots in THE COLOUR OF BLOOD. As Emily is found and the blackmailers are being tracked down, there are events in and surrounding the family from years ago, leading up to current day, that are rapidly revealed. The book roars along at a rapid pace with revelation and resolution overlapping themselves at every twist.
 
There's also a great sense of irony, of gentle humour, the cast of characters certainly help with that. The dentist Shane, whose Medical Doctor father never quite "approved" of his choice of career. Sandra, the Irish Princess, sister of Shane, family manipulator, she of the vaguely Gothic look, swooping down from the family estates to rescue Emily and her son Jonathan. Jonathan and his purposely put on private school boy touches. None of these humorous touches are overdone but they balance the brutality of many of the other aspects of the novel.
 
Finally, there's a great sense of place in THE COLOUR OF BLOOD. Current day Dublin with its wealth, opportunity, developers and 21st century values are contrasted brutally against the greed, exploitation, societal manipulation, hypocrisy, criminal gangs, drugs and violence. And ultimately that's the crux of the whole book - if something's rotten at the core, then it doesn't matter a damn where that something is positioned on the social scale - the damage lingers and it will come back to bite you.
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