The Color of Blood (Ed Loy Series #2) » (~)

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.

A reputable dentist from a venerable medical family, Shane Howard wants Loy to find his lost daughter after receiving a set of photographs featuring nineteen-year-old Emily in provocative poses. But a simple missing persons case rapidly devolves into something even more sordid and grisly when two of the players are savagely slain. And it's only the beginning.

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.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

… the overheated theatrics are a proper fit for his tough-guy hero, whose stern moral code and haunted personal history lend credibility to Hughes s recurring theme of the sins of the fathers and the legacy of tainted blood they pass on to their children.