All the Dead Voices (Ed Loy Series #4) »

Declan Hughes is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, and the cofounder and former artistic director of Rough Magic Theatre Company. He has been Writer-in-Association with the Abbey Theatre. The first Ed Loy novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, was nominated for the CWA New Blood Dagger and won the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel. His second novel, The Color of Blood, was also nominated for a Shamus, and his third, The Price of Blood, was nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, and Macavity Awards for best novel. Hughes lives in Dublin with his wife and two daughters.

Dublin PI Ed Loy is trying to escape his past a task easier said than done in this new novel from Shamus Award-winning author Declan Hughes

Shortly after moving from his childhood home on the outskirts of Dublin to an apartment in the city, Ed Loy is approached by Anne Fogarty, a woman whose father was killed fifteen years ago. She thinks the police nabbed the wrong person, and now she wants Loy to find the truth. At the top of the list of possible suspects are three men Anne's father, a revenue inspector, was preparing claims against for criminal activity: Bobby Doyle, an ex-IRA man turned property developer; Jack Cullen, also ex-IRA, now the head of a gang of disgruntled IRA men; and George Halligan, Loy's underworld nemesis.

At the same time, Loy is asked to look into the death of Paul Delaney, a rising soccer star who may have been connected with Jack Cullen. With the two cases on a collision course, Loy scours the streets of a city divided where the wounded Celtic Tiger walks hand in hand with the ghosts of a violent past.

With his gripping mysteries in the tradition of Raymond Chandler's and Ross MacDonald's best, a striking portrayal of an Ireland seldom seen, and a classic hero in Ed Loy, Declan Hughes cements his place as one of the most talented new crime writers working today.

Publishers Weekly

In Shamus-winner Hughes's solid fourth crime thriller to feature Dublin PI Ed Loy (after The Price of Blood), Anne Fogarty hires Loy to re-examine the facts surrounding her father's unsolved murder in 1991-her mother's boyfriend was found guilty but later released on appeal for the fatal beating. Loy has a second murder to look into after Paul Delaney, a promising footballer on whom Loy was keeping unofficial tabs, is gunned down. The PI learns that Anne's father, a tax inspector, had prepared informal dossiers on three men he believed to be evading taxes and, not coincidentally, members of the IRA. One of the men is a Dublin gangster with ties to the IRA who may have been grooming Paul as a protégé. While U.S. readers unschooled with the particulars of the Troubles may have difficulty differentiating the IRA from the less familiar INLA (Irish National Liberation Army), Hughes's ear for dialogue and his liberal-but never gratuitous-use of violence make for an intense read. (July)

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