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."
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.