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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I liked this one even better than the first one, April 24, 2007
This review is from: The Color of Blood: An Irish Novel of Suspense (Hardcover)
I expected this one to be a bit less enthralling than the first, but I liked it even more.
Some reasons why:
1) the relationship between Ed Loy and his "sidekick" Tommy is developed a bit more, and one of the things I liked about it is that Tommy becomes far more than the genial liar he mostly was in the first book (The Wrong Kind of Blood);
2) Ed's character remains consistent, and while I wanted to box his ears sometimes (who says it's women who fall fast and hard for all the wrong people? guys can fall deeply in lust in a nanosecond, too, and Ed is a perfect example of that), mostly I liked that Declan Hughes knows who Ed is at his core and is faithful to that characterization;
3) I once more got a lot of background on Ireland, possibly more than I've gotten in about 50 previous books with Irish protagonists;
4) the dialogue seems, at least to this non-Irish reader, authentic and sometimes hilarious because of all the colloquialisms used throughout the book;
5) the plot is fairly complex and kept me guessing throughout much of the book (and even when I knew who the "bad guy" was, I still found an element of surprise in the details; and
6) I just plain like Ed Loy and his circle of acquaintances. (Ed's not always easy to like: he boozes it up more than he ought, and he's really a bit. . .well, stupid about relationships, but he's intellectually quick, drolly funny, and willing enough to delve into his own psyche.
I'd definitely read the first novel in this series before picking this one up, but you won't suffer much if you don't. It'll just be a smoother and more fulfilling ride if you do.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Over the Top, October 28, 2008
This is the second installment of the Ed Loy series - Ed is a Dublin PI, transplanted to LA and now back in Ireland. He's hired to find the daughter - who may or may not be involved in the world of pornography - of a somewhat reputable family and very quickly finds himself thrashing around in a family closet full of skeletons. The Color of Blood is a roller coaster ride from start to finish - murders, fires, sex, kidnappings - poor Ed doesn't sleep, rarely eats and is fueled by alcohol. A lot of spaghetti is thrown at the wall and though some of it sticks this reads like a Raymond Chandler meets Hunter S. Thompson meets Emeril hybrid - Plot development is accomplished by simply "Kicking it up a notch" with one spectacular event/revelation after another. So although this book is entertaining, at times it borders on incoherent with far too many twists and turns, red herrings, shootings, beatings and characters, leaving this reader sometimes confused and often incredulous.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"We Are the Hollow Men", May 8, 2008
Too to fair to author Declan Hughes, in writing Irish crime fiction, he's chosen to run with a tough - and accomplished - crowd. The Irish penchant for melancholy and despair, captured in a tradition of poetic prose, arguably defines modern noir crime. But lacking the stripped-down, chainsaw-jagged beauty of Ken Bruen's bleak tales of Galway, or the visceral violence and gritty character development of Adrian McKinty's journeys into Hell, or John Connolly's atmospherically creepy tales of a "honeycomb world", Hughes' well-written "The Color of Blood" comes off surprisingly flat and mildly pedestrian by comparison.
More Gothic romance - at least perverted romance - than hard-boiled suspense, "Blood" tells the story of the Howards, a venerable Dublin family being blackmailed with sexually explicit pictures of their rebellious teenage daughter Emily. When private detective Ed Loy is summoned by former rugby God and family patriarch Shane Howard to identify the culprits, find Emily, and generally restore the peace, he finds a family so dysfunctional that Ozzy Osbourne and clan seem like the Ozzie and Harriet Nelson by comparison - a family with more skeletons in the closet than Westminster Abbey. Turns out that Emily's apparent ransom is not much of a mystery after all, at least compared to trying to keep track of the sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, former wives, lovers and ex-lovers, murdered kin, service staff - well, you get my point - of this complicated and pretty much despicable cast of characters. Which is at the core of the novel's weakness - there are simply too many story threads to unwind, involving too many shallow people that we have little reason to care that much about. Even protagonist Ed Loy is a bit cardboard cutout - the standard street-hardened private eye from central casting with little to distinguish him from an all-too-crowded field. Nonetheless, the canny and unstoppable Loy manages to get to the bottom of multiple murders and dastardly deeds that have stumped the Guard for two and three decades, winding to a fiery end that was less surprising given a liberal - but effective - dose of foreshadowing.
Setting the negatives aside, Hughes definitely can write, and given some focus and a ruthless editors pen, "The Color of Blood" could have been a contender. But at the end of the day, if you're like me, it may leave you feeling unredeemed and unfulfilled - not unlike the Howards.
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