DECLAN HUGHES – The Wrong Kind of Blood. Nominated for Best Private Eye First Novel of the Year, 2007.

William Morrow, hardcover, February 2006. Harper, paperback, February 2007.

Book Description:

The Wrong Kind of Blood

After twenty years in Los Angeles, Ed Loy has come home to bury his mother. But hers is only the first dead body he encounters after crossing an ocean.

The city Loy once knew is an unrecognizable place, filled with gangsters, seducers, hucksters, and crazies, each with a scheme and an angle. But he can’t refuse the sexy former schoolmate who asks him to find her missing husband – or the old pal-turned-small time criminal who shows up on Loy’s doorstep with a hard-luck story and a recently fired gun. Suddenly, a tragic homecoming could prove fatal for the grieving investigator, as an unexplained photograph of his long-vanished father, a murky property deal, and a corpse discovered in the foundations of town hall combine to turn a curious case into a dark obsession – dragging Ed Loy into a violent underworld of drugs, extortion, and murder … and through his own haunted past where the dead will never rest.

   About the Author:

Declan Hughes has worked for more than twenty years in the theater in Dublin as director and playwright. In 1984, he cofounded Rough Magic, Ireland’s leading independent theater company. He has been writer in association with the Abbey Theatre and remains an artistic associate of Rough Magic. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

   Review excerpts:

Publishers Weekly: “In this overly busy and bloody crime thriller from Irish playwright Hughes, Edward Loy, an Irish PI transplanted to L.A., returns home to Dublin for his mother’s funeral. […] When the pace momentarily slackens, the author supplies some nicely observed pastoral views of Dublin and the Irish countryside, but the ongoing cacophony of violence deafens one to all but the most sanguinary details. Hughes has talent, but this caper, his first, doesn’t whet one’s appetite for more of the same.”

Booklist: “Loy is the sort of brash PI who would as soon use his head for inflicting blunt-force trauma as for cogitation. Hughes lacks his countryman Ken Bruen’s knack for making such feral types compelling, and his fine turn of phrase is marred by a proclivity for long expository speeches. On the other hand, he vividly conveys the sights, sounds, and smells of the Dublin streets. He’s clearly a cut or two below such gritty Irish bards as Bruen, John Connolly, and Adrian McKinty, but he bears watching.”

   Newly released and forthcoming Ed Loy novels:

The Color of Blood. William Morrow, hardcover, April 2007. Harper, paperback, March 2008.

The Price of Blood. William Morrow, hardcover, March 2008.