Book Review: The Wrong Kind of Blood

Reviewed By: Catherine Thompson - RAM

The Wrong Kind of Blood     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Declan Hughes
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Thriller   Private Investigator
John Murray, $24.95 trade paperback, 346 pages

It all goes back to Fagan’s Villas. That’s what Ed Loy keeps hearing. He hasn’t been back to Dublin in 20 years, but now his mother is dead and he returns to bury her. The Dublin he knew has changed a great deal, and yet not at all.

Linda Dawson’s husband Peter has disappeared. Desperate, Linda asks Ed, who works as a private investigator in Los Angeles, to find him. Though he’s reluctant to do so, Ed agrees. Peter is the son of developer John Dawson, a big fish in the small business pond of Dublin. John Dawson grew up in Fagan’s Villas, just like Ed’s father Eamonn Loy. Dawson, Loy, and another young man, Kenneth Courtney, were known round the Villas as the three musketeers. But something happened. Courtney disappeared, left his wife and daughter; Eamonn Loy, by now a beaten man, left his wife and son; and John Dawson became rich. Now, as Ed looks into Peter’s disappearance, he begins to discover that his case really does go back to Fagan’s Villas.

I don’t know what it is about Irish writers. It doesn’t seem to matter what they turn their hands to, whether it be literary writing or down-and-dirty crime fiction, they do it with such style, such fluidity, that you can’t help but be swept along by the current. Hughes is one such. His characters are clearly born out of the setting, as real as that fellow you met down the pub by Trinity College. The plot is nice and tight. There are half a dozen threads to it, but not one frays. The Wrong Kind of Blood is Hughes’s first novel, and it’s a winner.

Catherine Thompson - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Catherine Thompson - RAM