The Color of Blood

February 26, 2007
Irish playwright Hughes follows up his successful contemporary crime debut, The Wrong Kind of Blood
(2006), with another gripping and gritty whodunit set in his native Dublin. PI Ed Loy, who's still adjusting to his return to Dublin after two decades in Los Angeles, gets hired by affluent dentist Shane Howard, the son of a legendary local doctor, to locate Shane's errant teenage daughter, Emily. Loy quickly tracks down Emily, but the sordid intimate relationship she's enjoying with a cousin proves only to be the tip of the iceberg for the Howard family's dysfunction. After several murders, including that of Emily's boyfriend, Loy finds that the roots of the violence may be in the distant past. The sharp writing and strong local color distinguish this novel from the common run of thrillers, though the pileup of corpses at the end is an overly neat way of tying up too many loose ends.