Journal Entry 1 by sarradee at Triumph Cafe OBCZ -3808 Spicewood Springs Rd in Austin, Texas USA on Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Released 2 yrs ago (10/13/2009 UTC) at Triumph Cafe OBCZ -3808 Spicewood Springs Rd in Austin, Texas USA

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Bringing to the Austin meetup tonight. Will leave on the shelf if not taken. 

Journal Entry 2 by sarradee from Dallas, Texas USA on Tuesday, October 13, 2009

From Booklist
PI Edward Loy returns to Ireland from California to bury his mother and lands himself in a knotty thicket of iniquity, as the Irish real-estate boom unearths old corpses and creates a few new ones. Retained by a profligate lady friend to find her missing husband, Loy wades into the labyrinthine dealings of two conspicuous families, the land--developing Dawsons and the drug-dealing Halligans, who may have more in common than either would like to admit. Loy is the sort of brash PI who would as soon use his head for inflicting blunt-force trauma as for cogitation. Hughes lacks his countryman Ken Bruen's knack for making such feral types compelling, and his fine turn of phrase is marred by a proclivity for long expository speeches. On the other hand, he vividly conveys the sights, sounds, and smells of the Dublin streets. He's clearly a cut or two below such gritty Irish bards as Bruen, John Connolly, and Adrian McKinty, but he bears watching. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved 

Journal Entry 3 by aetm from Austin, Texas USA on Thursday, February 11, 2010

Let's see how this 'Irish Harry Bosch' turns out. 

Journal Entry 4 by aetm from Austin, Texas USA on Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Hmm... did the marketing team read the book before comparing Loy to Bosch? The similarities are way too few - working in law enforcement, living in LA, moving smoothly among the outlaws when needed. But those are the similarities. When they tried to market him as 'Harry Bosch for Ireland', that gives certain clues of what to expect.

In Bosch stories, there is action from first page to the last page. Here the action was way less. Way more dialogue, and which didn't really fit either. The book is written as "I" form as seen by Loy, and the dialogs are not something I can imagine Dubliners have. Way too book speak. Way too long dialogs (an average phrase or thing someone says has 12 words or less). No, I don't really see people in Dublin say the words that are put to their mouths. Their speech just doesn't really sound like they were in Dublin.

And I don't see where Loy got some words in his vocabulary: aubergine and magnolia. He lived in Dublin until early 1980s, and had lived in LA until returning for his mum's funerals (so until the whole story here is based). I don't think middle class in Dublin had seen an eggplant (=aubergine) by that time. And in US who'd use that term? He didn't seem to hang with the Irish there. Yet he describes so many ladies lipsticks and shirts being of aubergine color. Magnolia is the new painters white for housing in Ireland, but not from the 1980s. Magnolia is simply cream or vanilla as color... and neither that aubergine wouldn't have been called aubergine by Bosch, it'd be simply a dark violet for what comes to the likely vocabulary of a policeman or private investigator, heterosexual, of 43 years, after living 25 years in California.

At least I have two actual Boschs on the TBR pile to go next... 

Journal Entry 5 by aetm at Triumph Cafe OBCZ -3808 Spicewood Springs Rd in Austin, Texas USA on Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Released 2 yrs ago (3/9/2010 UTC) at Triumph Cafe OBCZ -3808 Spicewood Springs Rd in Austin, Texas USA

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