Ed Loy Novels
About this ebook series
After twenty years in Los Angeles, Ed Loy has come home to bury his mother. But hers is only the first dead body he encounters after crossing an ocean.
The city Loy once knew is an unrecognizable place, filled with gangsters, seducers, hucksters, and crazies, each with a scheme and an angle. But he can't refuse the sexy former schoolmate who asks him to find her missing husband—or the old pal-turned-small time criminal who shows up on Loy's doorstep with a hard-luck story and a recently fired gun. Suddenly, a tragic homecoming could prove fatal for the grieving investigator, as an unexplained photograph of his long-vanished father, a murky property deal, and a corpse discovered in the foundations of town hall combine to turn a curious case into a dark obsession—dragging Ed Loy into a violent underworld of drugs, extortion, and murder . . . and through his own haunted past where the dead will never rest.
The city Loy once knew is an unrecognizable place, filled with gangsters, seducers, hucksters, and crazies, each with a scheme and an angle. But he can't refuse the sexy former schoolmate who asks him to find her missing husband—or the old pal-turned-small time criminal who shows up on Loy's doorstep with a hard-luck story and a recently fired gun. Suddenly, a tragic homecoming could prove fatal for the grieving investigator, as an unexplained photograph of his long-vanished father, a murky property deal, and a corpse discovered in the foundations of town hall combine to turn a curious case into a dark obsession—dragging Ed Loy into a violent underworld of drugs, extortion, and murder . . . and through his own haunted past where the dead will never rest.
The Howard family is not what it seems. Beneath a veneer of wealth and respectability is a dark history of corruption and rot and secrets best left unearthed. By entering the Howards' vicious circle, Loy may find himself stained with the most corrosive and lethal type of blood—the kind that even death cannot eradicate.
He is not without luck, however. While working another case, Loy discovers a phone number that seems linked to F.X. found on an unidentified body. Thinking it more than a coincidence, he begins digging into the history of the Tyrrells—a history consumed with trading and dealing, gambling and horse breeding—and soon realizes there is more to the family than meets the eye, a suspicion confirmed when two more people with connections to the Tyrrells are killed.
On the eve of one of Ireland's most anticipated sporting events, the four-day Leopardstown Race-course Christmas Festival, all bets are off as Loy pursues a twisted killer on the final leg of a reckless master plan.
In The Price of Blood, Declan Hughes once again paints an arresting portrait of an Ireland not found in any guidebooks. Deadly passions beget dark secrets in a chilling story that will have readers on edge right up to its shocking conclusion.
—Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of Life Sentences
Author Declan Hughes has already won a Shamus Award—and has been nominated for a CWA New Blood Dagger, a Macavity, and an Edgar® Award—for his internationally bestselling series featuring Irish private investigator Ed Loy. Hughes’s remarkable thriller All the Dead Voices should dispel any doubts (if there were any) that he truly belongs in upper ranks of crime fiction writers—alongside John Connolly, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, and Dennis Lehane. Set in modern-day Dublin, Ireland, and rich in suspense and atmosphere, All the Dead Voices sends a message loud and clear that Declan Hughes is a literary force to be reckoned with!
—John Connolly
Shamus Award winner and Edgar® Award nominee Declan Hughes does for Dublin what Dennis Lehane does for his native Boston. In City of Lost Girls, “Ireland’s Ross MacDonald” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) transports his private investigator, Ed Loy, from the Emerald Isle to the mean streets of Los Angeles and into the sordid heart of Hollywood in search of three young missing woman. City of Lost Girls is unrelentingly exciting and refreshingly intelligent—another shining example of how Hughes “demonstrates that the private detective novel can be vital, modern, and relevant in the right hands” (Laura Lippman).