The Colour of Blood

not sure if I should even be allowed to comment on this one: I'll admit up front I didn't bother to follow the story line at all. Two reasons - 1)the writing struck me as so gorgeous and stark that i read this entire book during a series of evenings very late with a glass of wine - a particular indulgence and 2)i didn't much care how the scenes hung together, or even if they did, after a while: the smallest interactions, fractions of scenes really, are like these full-realized and compelling and awful and gripping and occasionally heart-rending little vignettes. I was so caught up in *them* that I lost the thread, and didn't mind losing it.

DH, you're a little scary but you sure make driving to the edge seem like a tempting proposition - show more

some favorite passages -
"That was how it went with Tommy and me: first I had to be his older brother, then his father, then his headmaster. And having to be anybody's headmaster was a bolt upright 3:00 a.m. nightmare at the best of times, and it never seemed to be the best of times anymore."

"I didn't just make my living this way, and it wasn't just about justice; I seemed to need the chaos other people brought me so I could make a pattern from it, establish the connections they couldn't see themselves. Not from envy, but from need."

"The bar was thronged with people who looked like they'd been a t a party for too long and needed to go home, but had forgotten where they lived. My type of crowd."

"The right side of my head felt like a boiled flesh poultice attached to my brain with barbed wire and rusty nails." [honestly, give the guy an award just for that sentence.]

"On the main lawn through the smoke, I thought I saw a murder of crows assembled, thought I could hear the beating of wings; when I got closer, I saw that it was a bunch of uniformed Guards spilling over the grass." show less

Title: THE COLOUR OF BLOOD
Author: Declan Hughes
Publisher: Hachette Livre
Edition released: May 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7195-6841-1
346 pages
Review by: Karen Chisholm

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 show more 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. show less

Complicated and convoluted story of a family who have a lot of skeletons in their closet. Ed Loy gets involved when Emily, the daughter, is reported kidnapped and her father is sent photographs of her, naked.

As Ed uncovers the truth the bodies mount.

It's pretty evocative of the messy, complicated feuds that happen in Dublin these days. The body count is pretty high though and you'd have to wonder at the mess it makes of the lives left over.

I have struggled through this book as much, if not more so, than I did with The Wrong Kind of Blood. Big disappointment after City of Lost Girls.

Mr. Hughes is working really hard at writing an Irish hardboiled detective novel, but this just doesn't work for me. The book sort of plods along with plenty of grim and depressing happenings and just not much going on that I care about. I don't care whodunit. I don't care why. I just want it to be over.

This is the second in the Ed Loy series, following "The Wrong Kind of Blood". This is very close to a five star book, and by the next installment, Mr. Hughes moves into the five and a half star range. Declan Hughes never did seem to write a 'first' novel.. he jumped out of the gate writing better than 90% of his peers, and by his third novel he was in pretty rarified company. If you like mystery, noir mystery, with a lot of brutal action, that just happens to take place in Dublin instead of NYC or LA.. you're really going to like the Ed Loy series. Ed's boyhood pal, Tommy Owens, begins taking a larger role in this book. If you recall the old "Rockford Files" TV show and remember Angel.. you'll have a pretty good idea of Tommy's show more character, if you also picture him extremely dangerous! I almost always suggest reading a series in order, and do in this case also. show less

14 bodies by my count in the blody "The Color of Blood". and I may have missed 1 or 2.Ed Loy is a tough guy who takes a lot of punches. A lot of punches. He has no pretensions and tells it like it is.Once again he writes of current day murders linked to events of 30 years ago. But this is only his 2nd book and Hughes feels a bit out of control here. Definitely too many bodies, but too many characters as well, and there are characters linked to other characters all over the placeI tried to keep a diagram of all the relationships but by the end I couldn't read my own notes. But i'll keep reading this guy.

A fun, quick detective read brought to us from Ireland