The Wrong Kind of Blood

There are a lot of good things to say about Declan Hughes's The Wrong Kind of Blood.  Ed Loy, the PI protagonist, is an appealing but flawed narrator; the Dublin setting is nicely realized; the denouement is effective.  Not only that, but Hughes has added symbolic weight to the "wrong kind of blood" in the story, showing a nice literary awareness.  In this book, the wrong kind of blood can refer to class differences, physical incompatibilities, the blood-typing of a paternity test, and more.


But it just didn't work for me.  Part of the problem is the heavy over-loading of coincidence that Hughes needs for his story to work.  In order to tie two generations of crimes together, a body of a man killed 20 years ago must be discovered at the same time as the case Ed Loy is investigate, even though there's no other connection between the discovery of the body and the disappearance.  Three days earlier or later on the body, and there's no novel.  That's just one coincidence of many in the novel, but the whole book hinges on it, and it was a real problem for me.


In general, the problem the book has is that there are something like 5 barely connected cases going on, and there's some real reaching to get Ed Loy involved in all of them, especially since he's not a professional cop.  (I think that this is the advantage stories with professional police officers have -- you can conceive of a bunch of unconnected cases crossing one guy's docket).