Declan Hughes, The Color Of Blood

The Color Of Blood

Declan Hughes

Morrow, April 2007, $24.95

ISBN: 0060825499

After spending twenty years in Los Angeles, private investigator Ed Loy returned to his home town of Dublin to bury his mother (see THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD). He has stayed in the Irish capital, although he finds it quite different from the seedy neighborhood he grew up in, as the city has given way to an affluent gentrification.

Dentist Shane Howard of the highly regarded medical family, hires Ed to find his missing teenage daughter, Emily. The only apparent clues are a series of photos starring Emily in various positions that to the sleuth are not poses.

Ed barely blinks as he quickly locates the nineteen year old runaway. She is enjoying a tryst with her cousin. However, the case takes a bizarre lethal spin as someone bludgeons Emily's mother and her former boyfriend to death. Someone wants to insure the family reputation remains intact, even if homicides are the only way to keep scandals interred. Unable to accept that the case is done, Loy investigates who the killer is.

The sequel to THE WRONG KIND OF BLOOD is a gritty dark look at the new money that has brought a revival to Dublin, through the eyes of a former resident who only recently returned to the city. The whodunit is cleverly designed to enable Ed to peel back the outer layer of the veneer of the Howards to the rotting core in the center. Though the climax is too simple of a clean sweep, THE COLOR OF BLOOD is a terrific Irish noir.