The Wrong Kind of Blood

Hennessy's had always been Bayview's little secret. Never mind the drugs and the underage drinking. Hennessy's was simply where you came if you didn't fit in. Daddy's little princess never came here, but her sister did, and she came with something to prove. It was the one place guaranteed to be free of rugby, golf, of competitive sport of any kind, and of the people who played it. Hennessy's clientele was pretty ambivalent about basic functioning, let alone competition.

Declan Hughes's The Wrong Kind of Blood is a classic noir. A smart talking private eye with a grudge and a tragic past: check. A beautiful dame with troubles and secrets of her own: check. A sidekick who just can't function in the real world: check. Corrupt politicians, show more policemen on the take, drugs and booze: check, check and check. Throw in a gritty, decaying version of Dublin and you get a fast paced, hardboiled rocket of a book. The mystery extends into the past and echoes up into the bloody present of a Dublin rife with new money and new development built with the results of back room dealings and love turned sour.

The Wrong Kind of Blood is set in the Dublin of five years ago, when the celtic tiger was roaring, but the story could have just as well occupied the mean streets of Los Angeles or New York in a film starring Faye Dunaway and Robert Mitchum. show less

Marvelous gothic crime thriller ... the burned out PI returns to his home in Ireland when his mother dies, & he reconnects after 20 years with "buddies" from the old neighborhood ... those who have become successful and those who have failed, those who are crooked and those who are straight. Gothic themes of crumbled fortunes, love secrets & betrayals, missing fathers, traded identities, and twinning are explored as mystery after mystery is uncovered. A major theme is blood: blood types and the secrets they reveal about identity.

The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes is the first in his series about Private Investigator Ed Loy who returns to Dublin for the funeral of his mother. He hasn’t been back for 20 years but it isn’t long before an old school friend has him investigating the disappearance of her husband. He agrees to help her not realizing how complicated this case will turn out to be. All too soon he is exposing some shady deals and uncovering old secrets, including some of his own family’s.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it had the right amount of action with intricate plotting and provided some great dialogue. This story reminded somewhat of the excellent Ken Bruen series about Jack Taylor in its ability to invoke the past and how it can show more affect the present. Ed Loy seems to have a better grip on himself than Jack Taylor, but I very interested to see where this series will go.

I will certainly be continuing on with this series. show less

Ed Loy has returned to Dublin to attend the funeral of his mother. He has been living in LA and has been gone for twenty years. He is approached by a drunken female acquaintance and she asks him to look for her missing husband. He had been working as a private detective in the States and word gets around. He agrees and quickly finds himself mired in a complex web of land-deals, gangsters and murder, reaching back decades and slowly drawing in his own parents. Hughes has constructed a solid, somewhat convoluted tale, bringing in some nice Irish color, like in this passage: “ I’d had it with Dublin, where everyone was someone’s brother or cousin or ex-girlfriend and no one would give you a straight answer, where my da knew your da show more and yours knew mine, where the past was always waiting around the next corner to ambush you.” In this story, blood is everything!
This is the first book of a series and is a strong introduction. show less

I'm not sure what it says about me that I find DH's Ed Loy irresistible. Probably something warped, since he's generally beaten to within an inch of his life, drunk, and screwing his clients.

God, he's hot. :)

That, I think, is a strong example of DH's pervasive skill. This book isn't the raw thrill-ride of the subsequent novel (The Color of Blood), I'm afraid; I missed the bare-bones brutality and more-florid phrasing. Wearing down of rough edges doesn't suit DH one bit and I hope this is a show of discretion that has been put to rest for good. (my fault, of course, for reading out of order. mea culpa.)

The plot, which has a bit too much dry city-hall zoning-squabble for my taste, doesn't blossom into a full-throttle show more family/blood/empire/feud until too far into the book - perhaps 2/3 way, in fact. *Not* a conscionable delay: that's what rewrites are for.

But when it does get off the blocks it does so in the style that I love DH for: unapologetically violent, passionate and shockingly sweet at times - like a pause for a kiss in a gun battle...wait, what am I saying, it is *precisely* that....

oh, and may I say this, fellow library-thingers: explain yourselves! Reviews don't have to be polished, but I'd sure like to know how a person could judge this book a 1. Uh, not that you're not entitled, just - share your thoughts, please. show less

Quite a gritty story of death and deception and the lives of several people. When Ed Loy returns to Dublin to attend his mother's funeral he doesn't expect to be asked to find Linda Dawson's husband. This is work he does in the US, not in Ireland and he's tried to sever as many of his ties to Ireland as possible. He gets sucked into the mystery and the involved politics of people.

While I've seen reviews that have suggested that people don't talk like that, I've heard people who do on the streets of Dublin. This story captures some of the flavour of Dublin's underbelly and it's not a pleasant sight. I was recommended this by a borrower in the Library and I'm glad I tried it.

Completed 5/5/11, 4 1/2 stars, first in the series but now I am caught up and am current. No info on the next book. Like all the other books in the series lots of local color, tough, gritty, good tension, Ed Loy gets beat up 3 or 4 times. Lots of booze, lots of interesting characters, a bit of non-graphic sex. In the background is Ed'd Da, who just left one fine day and was never seen again. Ed has come to Ireland to bury his Mom and has every intention of returning to his California PI job when he is asked by an old (sexy) contact to find her missing husband. Bodies start turning up left and right, and current events of course tie back to the time of Ed's Dad and his disappearance. There is tons of old history and if you are not paying show more close attention to the most obscure of clues (as I did not) you will miss the un-obvious solution, but Thank God Ed was paying attention. But it's not the crime solving that makes this book so interesting, it's the Journey. Had I read this one first, I would have gone on to read this series in order with the same level of enjoyment but no more than my helter skelter approach to this excellent series. Hurry up and write another one, Declan. show less