Ed Loy PI
6 total works
Even the best private eye needs more than a name to find a missing person, but that's all that Father Vincent Tyrrell, the brother of prominent racehorse trainer FX Tyrrell, will offer Loy when he comes to him for help.
A dwindling bank account convinces Loy to delve into the deadly underworld of horse racing, but fortune soon smiles on him: while working another case, he discovers a phone number linked to FX on a badly beaten body left at an illegal dump. Loy's been around long enough to know that there's more to the Tyrrell family than meets the eye - and then a third body appears.
At Christmastime, on the eve of one of Ireland's most anticipated racing events, the intrepid investigator bets his life on a longshot: finding answers in a shady network of trading and dealing, gambling and breeding.
'The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband. Now she was lying dead on her living room floor, and the howl of a police siren echoed through the surrounding hills . . . '
Ed Loy hasn't been back to Dublin for twenty years. But his mother has died, and he has returned home to bury her. Loy soon realizes that the world waiting for him is very different from the one he left behind all those years ago. When an old school friend asks him to investigate the disappearance of her husband, Loy reluctantly agrees.
And suddenly in this place where he grew up - among the Georgian houses, Victorian castles, and modern villas of Castlehill - Loy finds himself thrown into a world of organized crime, long-hidden secrets, corruption and murder.
Ed Loy has made some changes.
He has moved into an apartment in Dublin's city centre, leaving behind his family home: he wants to break free of the ghosts of his own past, to live in the teeming present. But if that's what he wants for his own life, it's not always what his clients will permit: the baggage they bring with him propel him relentlessly into past.
The police are working along similar lines with their new Cold Case unit. Looking back over a fifteen-year-old murder, they are satisfied by their original findings - but not so Loy. He has been hired by the victim's daughter to investigate the suspects ignored by the first investigation: a rich property developer, an ex-IRA man and Loy's own nemesis, George Halligan.
But Loy has to watch his back: in the murky world into which he has fallen, he can't tell which threats come from the IRA and which from the police protecting their old case. Can Loy persuade his longstanding friend DI Dave Donnelly to help solve the Fogarty case, or does he have to rely on the murderous George Halligan? Does it all go back to the IRA? Are the men who gave the commands now respectable citizens?
In his toughest case yet, Ed Loy delves into the dirty side of life in the new Ireland, where progress comes at a price and no one is free of their past.
