Book Review - The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes

Synopsis:  After more than two decades away, private detective Ed Loy returns from L.A. to his hometown of Dublin for his mother's funeral. But his grieving soon takes an unexpected turn when his old classmate Linda Dawson pleads with him to find her missing husband, Peter. As if a worried wife with a seductive persona weren't enough to keep Loy occupied, his childhood pal turned small-time criminal, Tommy Owens, shows up on Loy's doorstep with a hard-luck story and a recently fired gun.

When Loy finds an old photograph of his long-missing father on Peter Dawson's boat, and a corpse is discovered in the foundations of the local town hall, things begin to get personal. Then a murky property deal linked to the Dawson family not only threatens to expose the corrupt secrets concealed behind the great gates of the mansions on the hill, but also leads Loy to the land below, a violent underworld of drug dealing, extortion, and murder presided over by the notorious Halligan brothers, local purveyors of organized criminal mayhem. As he tries to lay the dead to rest, the case becomes a dark obsession, and Ed Loy finds that the truth of the present can only be fully understood by uncovering the secrets of the past, and that in Ireland, everything-- and everyone - is connected.

First Line:  "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."

Random Quote:  "It was stuffy and warm in the airless room, and I could smell my own scent rising, a toxic cloud of booze and sweat and smoke.  My skin was crawling, and I wanted to scrub it with a can of bleach and a wire brush."

Review:  I really enjoyed The City of Lost Girls which is the 5th in this series so I thought I'd go back and read the others.

The River Liffey at sunset - Dublin - Image by féileacán via Flickr

So far this has been a disappointing experiment. Maybe this book suffers in comparison to the later one and it probably isn't helping things that I read it after finishing The Whisperers by John Connolly which I absolutely adored, but the fact is that finishing this was a struggle.

Mr. Hughes writes and plots well, but overall the book is sort of gray and cold and more drab than grim (if it had been more grim it might've been more compelling). It reminds me of the feeling I used to get when I lived in Seattle when February rolled around and days were short, gray, cold, and indescribably dreary and had been that way for the past 350 years or so.

Not a terrible book, but not a great one, either.

FTC Disclosure:  San Leandro Public Library

Rating:  White

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