Loy of the land

CRIME: The Dying Breed b y Declan Hughes John Murray, 313pp. £11.99.

CRIME: The Dying Breed by Declan Hughes John Murray, 313pp. £11.99.

TIMES ARE TOUGH for private detective Ed Loy. He is a victim of his own success. Cash has been thin on the ground ever since the high profile eruption of his last case thrust him into the public eye. It is discretion his clients seek, not notoriety. They don't want things blown apart. Unfortunately, that's what happens when Ed Loy takes a case. Things blow apart. Houses of cards tumble down. There are murders, suicides, immolations. Numb survivors are left staggering around. Ed Loy is an agent of catharsis. This has made him something of an untouchable amongst those with things to hide.

So Loy ends up taking jobs he doesn't want. Jobs that are beneath him. Like catching illegal fly tippers. Like tracking down a missing person for the local priest. Loy doesn't want the Fr Vincent Tyrell job, and Fr Vincent Tyrell doesn't want to sully himself with Loy, but both men inhabit a less than perfect world, and this is where Declan Hughes's interest lies: moral weaknesses, fissures, fatal flaws in the human race - the deeper, the more terminal, the better.

Fr Vincent Tyrell, brother of prominent racehorse trainer FX Tyrell, engages Loy to locate missing jockey Patrick Hutton, who disappeared 10 years previously in a maelstrom of allegations of race-fixing. The priest admits he knows more about Hutton - "I know much, much more" - but to reveal his knowledge would violate the sanctity of the confessional.

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And thus Loy embarks on a journey into the underworld of horseracing, or horserace-fixing, to be more accurate. Within hours, the first corpse turns up. The second turns out to be just a few feet away. When a third is discovered, all with their tongues cut out, and all bearing the same strange tattoo, it seems a serial killer is on the loose. The Omega Man, the Garda quickly name him. The question is, which of the many sociopaths in the novel is responsible? What a selection Hughes offers the reader to choose from.

It is in his observation of Irish society - specifically, his observation of the post-property boom seismic shifts in Irish society - that Hughes is at his most incisive. The dark secrets of Ireland's past are here: incest, industrial school child abuse, violence, rampant alcoholism. However, the present (and possibly future) upheaval of the social order is delineated with uncanny alertness, to the extent that the novel ends on a note which recalls the recent mindless, motiveless, almost casual killings with a screwdriver of two Polish men in Drimnagh, though The Dying Breedwould have been completed before that atrocity.

The racing industry is run by "an equestrian Provo in a morning suit" and "all the politicians, the property developers, the rich" queue up to be his friend. An aspirational but disappointed middle-class mother notes that "one of the consequences of our great property boom is to fling people like us into close proximity with . . . people like that" - she means the Butlers from the corporation estate across the road. Turns out the Butlers have penetrated deeper into Irish society than anyone could have imagined. Deeper, and higher, because in Ireland "Any murdering drug-dealing scum-sucking savage can call himself an entrepreneur and be forgiven. Business washes us all clean". Loy is a hard-boiled, wise-cracking detective of the Raymond Chandler school. Nothing could surprise him. And yet. The things they get up to in North Co Wicklow. It's the specifically Irish peculiarities that set this novel apart. Savage beatings are followed by trips to midnight mass. Delirious benders are enriched by fortified cups of tea.

There are flaws. An abrupt and inconsistent switch to third person narrative is inserted towards the end to explore the mind of a sociopath. One half of the denouement is narrated by a secondary character, somewhat puncturing the immediacy. However, Hughes, a deeply atmospheric writer, carries it off. The discipline of his theatre background has been put to fine use. His keen ear for the demotic, his sharp eye for the damning detail, makes The Dying Breeda vivid, gripping, and occasionally chilling read.

Claire Kilroy's latest novel,Tenderwire , is published by Faber