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Sat 04 Apr 2009The Loy is back in town
CRIME:All the Dead VoicesBy Declan HughesJohn Murray, 308pp. £11.99
THE LOY is back. As are some other problems we had hoped we’d seen the back of in this country. A predominant strength of crime fiction is its ability to reflect the times we live in, to hold a mirror up to the high street, as Stendhal wrote. Novelist and playwright Declan Hughes, through his literary creation, Loy, is rolling with the punches our island nation has recently endured. In All the Dead Voices, the property bubble has burst, inner city heroin abuse is on the rise and, perhaps most ominously – and most prophetically on Hughes’s part – violent activity amongst dissident republicans has kicked off.
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