City of Lost Girls [Paperback]

Declan Hughes certainly has his finger on the pulse of Dublin society and has no qualms in cutting through the fakeness and revealing the rather more sordid dealings and attitudes that lie beneath the surface of respectability. Here, one's place in society is important, and whether it's dealing with the hierarchy of the church or the celebrity scene, Hughes knows it's still a tight-knit little community that just takes a few tugs to unravel. "In Dublin, it sometimes seems as if more than one degree of separation is too much to hope for", he writes in City of Lost Girls, and here that one-step remove, if there is one, is never far away from links to crime and scandal.

Keeping up-to-date with the changes that the Republic of Ireland is undergoing in the current financial climate - the Celtic Tiger perhaps suffering more than most - Hughes turns his eye to another proud Irish institution, the international celebrities of its acting and movie making industry. It's not exactly a thriving business as far as Irish movies are concerned, but favourable tax laws make it an attractive place to shoot movies and have encouraged many celebrities, Irish and faux-Irish (another favourite target of Hughes, attacking here the old ethereal mysticism and blarney in Irish filmmaking), to set-up in Dublin and been seen hanging out on the town with the likes of Bono and The Edge.

Behind every success story however there's a few skeletons, and probably more than a few in the case of Jack Donovan, favourite son of the city done good, an acclaimed and successful Hollywood film director who has come back to his hometown to shoot his latest movie. Private Detective Ed Loy has done his share of keeping closet doors locked in the past for Donovan and been thoroughly sickened by the experience, but when his services are called upon again after 15 years to look into the disappearance of two young female extras from the set, there's a lot more at stake than the expense of reshoots and a threat to the production schedule. Anonymous letters received by Donovan and a connection to the disappearance of three girls on the shoot of one of the director's previous films in LA, suggest that a serial killer who kills in threes has resurfaced and that he may be connected with the small group of people, including the director himself, who make up Donovan's production team.

If the serial killer plot is a little by-the-numbers, with occasional italicised chapters from the killer's perspective as interludes to the Ed Loy first-person narrative, it's still a thrilling prospect, not least because of the authenticity of Hughes' characterisation and his understanding of the closed little worlds of Irish society and their "one degree of separation" from low society. This inevitably brings in hard-to-shake-off baggage from previous Ed Loy investigations, but unlike The Dying Breed, Hughes achieves a better balance here, principally through the figure of Loy's girlfriend Anne Fogarty, allowing some normal, decent, down-to-earth qualities to offset the whole sordid business of moviemaking, private investigation and the Dublin social world. The dark and sordid themes are all still there, but it's a welcome touchstone to normality that prevents the bleakness from overwhelming the narrative this time, or indeed letting the narrator wallow in the existential horror of it all.

Declan Hughes' most recent book, CITY OF LOST GIRLS, is different from the previous Ed Loy books. The deranged people who have been a large part of his life are still there but on the edges of the story. In this book, Loy is dealing with a different kind of deranged killer, one who is a predator, enticing his victims by offering them help in the movie world where the line between pretense and reality is difficult to define.

Jack Donovan (who seems to be a combination of Neal Jordan, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and David Lynch) is a highly successful and acclaimed movie director whose career began with art house movies and progressed to the big screen and the big money. For most of his career, Donovan has worked in California and it was in California, 15 years before, that Ed Loy first met him. They met in a bar and one night Donovan decided to give Loy a part in the movie he was filming. Loy enjoys his 30 seconds of on-screen fame and when Donovan contacts him for help because three extras on his film have disappeared, Loy does his best to find them. The girls where run-aways from different parts of the US and it is only Donovan who notices they are gone and files the missing person reports. Loy has no luck finding them, Donovan's movie is finished, and Loy returns to Ireland.

All these years later, Donovan has returned to make a movie set in Dublin and the two men resume their friendship when Donovan asks Loy to look into some anonymous letters he has been receiving. Loy is willing and starts asking questions, learning that he really doesn't know anything about Jack Donovan at all. Then, Donovan's assistant contacts Ed. An extra on the film has disappeared, and then another, and then Loy decides he needs to put the third girl in hiding. Donovan has developed a style over the years, one in which he focuses on the faces of three minor players and the disappearance of the girls, unavailable now for filming, puts the movie in jeopardy. Donovan and Loy see clearly that this is a repeat of what happened in California and Loy sees clearly, that if the two incidents are connected there are only four suspects. The first is Jack Donovan, the second is Mark Cassidy, the cinematographer, the third is Conor Rowan, the assistant director, and the fourth is Maurice Faye, the producer of all Donovan's films. The Gang of Four are the only people who were at the sites of both disappearances.

Loy doesn't know how the anonymous letters and the disappearances of the girls are connected. Perhaps Kate and Nora did go off to party and will return, apologetically, in their own good time and continue their work on the film. But Loy knows, as he did in California, that these girls are gone.

Hughes intersperses the narrative with the thoughts of the murderer but he doesn't give anything away about the identity until he is ready to let the reader in on the secret. There is less overt brutality in this book but the body count is higher. I think it is the best book of the series.

Shamus Award winner Declan Hughes isn't just any noteworthy crime writer - he's an Irish one and for this reader that makes all the difference. There's a bit of a poet in him, as well as a richly developed descriptive technique. Now, add to this his two decades as a playwright and screenwriter, a background which he brings to the printed page, and you have CITY OF LOST GIRLS.

With this, the fifth in Hughes's Irish private investigator Ed Loy series we find Loy torn between tracking a psychotic murderer who kills young girls, always a trio of them, and the history he shares with film director Jack Donovan. They go back quite a way; as Loy says of their past, "I don't want to talk about it, don't want to think about it. Sooner or later, we would get to it anyway. The past is always out there, a land mine buried and forgotten about, ready to blow the present apart at any moment." And, there are plenty of land mines for Loy to avoid in this story.

As it happens Donovan is now shooting a film in Dublin, and he calls Loy to find the person sending him threatening letters. The task is complicated when two extras in the film, young girls, go missing. There is a third girl, who must be protected. Eventually, Loy finds a similarity between what is happening in Dublin and what happened in Los Angeles some years ago - three young women disappeared from a film that Jack Donovan was making. LAPD never found them and when presumed dead had no clue as to the murderer.

Loy returns to Los Angeles to try to piece together the connection fully aware that a serial killer is still loose, perhaps in Dublin.

Hughes studs CITY OF LOST GIRLS with vignettes regarding Hollywood's beautiful people and film making itself, while at the same time ratcheting up suspense via an eerie voice, an anonymous narrator who is obviously the killer.

- Gail Cooke