I didn’t take to this book at first and wasn’t sure why. Then it was pointed out to me that Declan Hughes writes more in the traditional detective style, self-questioning, like Philip Marlow. What I had been looking for was another flashy character like Saxon in the Ingrid Black books. With that in mind, I started over and found myself reading most of the night.

Ed Loy has returns to Dublin after twenty plus years to bury his mother, On the night after the funeral, Linda Dawson, an old school friend, ask Ed to find her husband, Peter, who has been missing for four days. The first sentence is an attention grabber and gives you an idea of the writing:

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.

Ed’s investigation touches the highest and lowest strata of society, shady real estate deals, corrupt politicians, and crime lords seem to be linked. The story is complex and reaches back to events over twenty years in the past. Early in the investigation Ed finds a fragment of a photograph that shows his father who disappeared long ago. This makes the investigation more personal than helping a friend, how could his father be involved.

Hughes’ writing is a pleasure to read. He has the dry comments you associate with hard-boiled detectives.

I followed her through. Her scent was so intense, I felt I was tracking her.

[about a character sniffing a cigar] It made a scrabbling sound as it chafed against his mustache, like a small animal trapped behind drywall.

He also lets Loy go off on someone with a Joe Friday lecture such as this one where he boils down to its essence, the place of the private detective.

The problem is, you don’t know who I am. Because you hired a private detective, and no one wants to know who a private detective is. He’s too shabby and disreputable and hustle-a-buck ordinary to make the grade at your charity balls and grand-a-plate dinners and that suits him fine, because that way, he can get on with what he’s been hired to do. That’s the point of him really, like a dog that’s been bred to work, he can’t relax by sitting around. He’s got to be prying and poking and stirring things up until somehow, out falls the truth, or enough of it to make a difference.

More so that other books set in Ireland that I’ve read lately, his use of slang gives the reader a sense of place. Someone from Ireland might wonder what I’m going on about but where I live I would be hard pressed to write dialog that had any distinguishing, regional flavor. I could go twenty miles and find it, just not where I’m living. This is a long-winded way of saying that I appreciate having to stretch a bit to figure out what a character is saying. It seems more authentic. For example, at one point Ed Loy says, This was old money, Dublin 4 money. Not too hard to figure out in context but Wikipedia says that Dublin 4 or D4 refers to a Dublin postal code where the upper class live. Another character refers to people dressing like culchies. A culchie is a country person. And we also learn the word langers which can be a swear word referring to a portion of the male anatomy or mean that someone is drunk or foolish. Very versatile.

If you like classic style private investigator stories, on the edge of being hard-boiled, with good, witty writing, I highly recommend The Wrong Kind of Blood. If you generally read cozies, you might want to give this one a miss. There is blood, violence, and swearing using at least one word we don’t use often in the U.S..