Finished: “The Wrong Kind of Blood” by Declan Hughes

Finished: The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes, 2006, 0060825464.

Good novel but not great. Like the title suggests, Hughes has a theme of blood throughout the novel. The topics of family bloodlines, biological blood types, and obligations to blood relatives run throughout the story.

After living in Los Angeles for twenty year, Ed Loy returns to Dublin to bury his mother. At the funeral reception a lady friend swaps spit with him and then asks him to investigate her husband's recent disappearance. Loy was a P.I. in L.A. for several years and since he needs the money he takes the case. The husband turns up dead so do the corpses of other people involved in the case.

Hughes does a decent job of tying in several family mysteries with old and new criminal conspiracies. The blood theme does get old though, Hughes just about shouts out part of the ending at the novel's halfway point. According to the book jacket another Ed Loy novel will be published in 2007. I'll probably check it over but on the basis of this one I should probably skip over it. I have enough books on my To Read list than to run into a disappointment.

EDIT: After further thought, this is really only a decent/average novel. I had to force myself to keep reading it. It was only after I was about halfway through that I started to get interested in the story. I'm used to mystery novel protagonists with more "Umph" in their actions.