The Dying Breed [Paperback]

This is the third in the Ed Loy, Private Investigator series, which are set in Dublin.
The Dying Breed has a similar plot to the first 2 novels in the series - that of totally dysfunctional families and how evil deeds and past sins affect siblings.
Ed Loy, is asked by a priest, Vincent Tyrell to find a jockey who disappeared 10 years ago. All he is able to provide Ed with is the name Patrick Hutton as he is bound by the sanctity of the confessional. Soon the dead bodies mount and the reader is immersed into the complicated families. In this case, Vincent Tyrell has an estranged brother, (FX Tyrell) a successful horse racing trainer and breeder and a sister, (Regina Tyrell) who works for the horse racing trainer brother.

Ed realises that the link with the missing jockey and the bodies is with the Tyrell family with his investigations revealing some very nasty family secrets. As in the previous 2 novels, the characters cannot be relied upon to give truthful information so the reader is left wondering what is reliable or not.

The novel moves at a good pace and Loy's character, together with that of his sidekick, Tommy, are becoming more detailed. Hughes also adds interest through giving an insight into Irish society past and present - neglect in Church run schools, corruption in the horse racing world and criminals turned good from their ill-gotten wealth.

What stopped me from giving this 5 stars was that the ending seem to come out in a rushed tumbling way and that although Hughes uses the first person throughout - the end was strange in that it was an account given by Tommy.

A problem I find with declan hughes is overplotting.By the end you just want to get it over with.

Back in May 2010, I wrote a review of Declan Hughes third Ed Loy Irish crime novel for Amazon USA. Aren't there any Ross MacDonald readers and lovers over in Britain? Our fictional private investigators are more than hard-boiled crime detectors: they delve into family secrets. Didn't you wonder why Hughes selected the title? Re-read this exciting book after you read my review! You missed something! Declan Hughes is the Irish Ross MacDonald.

In a recent interview, Irish author Declan Hughes talks about his Ed Loy mystery series. The books, he says, are family gothic. "Despite the impression Irish people give that we're open and friendly and candid, there's a lot we don't want to tell you -- a lot of skeletons in our closets."

In this third Ed Loy P. I. novel, Hughes relates a family saga full of family blood, betrayal, and secrets. Keeping the secrets is THE PRICE OF BLOOD (UK title: A DYING BREED).

Ed Loy, a private investigator, is asked to solve the disappearance of a jockey who worked for the prominent racehorse trainer, F. X. Tyrell. The Tyrells are well known in the region around north Wicklow and the Dublin Border. They, two brothers and a sister, are the usual rich Irish Catholic family: elder brother inherits the farm, younger becomes a priest, and unmarried sister comes home and keeps house for her older brother. Along the way Ed works closely with boyhood friend Dave Connelly, a detective sergeant with the Garda, as they try to solve three murders by the Omega Man, a vicious killer who cuts out the tongues of his victims. (Dave and Ed's trip to the morgue in Chapter Seven explains their camaraderie with a bit of humor.)

This powerful tale takes the reader into the midst of contemporary Irish life in Dublin and features one of Ireland's most anticipated sports events, the four-day Leopardstown Racecourse Christmas Festival.

And reveals the secrets of the industrial schools of yesterday. It seems F. X. Tyrell recruited his jockeys from the lads at the not-quite-an orphanage for wayward boys. After a chilling contemporary visit to the remains of one such school, Hughes comments:

...The basic components were all in place: half-educated Christian Brothers, some of whom had themselves been physically and sexually abused, inflicting that abuse on others; abuse among the boys themselves as the old turned on the young; a collective disbelief among the wider community, including priests, teachers, the Guards, a justice of the peace, and even journalists on the local paper, that amounted to denial...

Hughes has indeed written another Irish family saga. You'll want to rush out to read his previous Ed Loy books.