City of Lost Girls [Paperback]

Declan Hughes' most recent book, CITY OF LOST GIRLS, is different from the previous Ed Loy books. The deranged people who have been a large part of his life are still there but on the edges of the story. In this book, Loy is dealing with a different kind of deranged killer, one who is a predator, enticing his victims by offering them help in the movie world where the line between pretense and reality is difficult to define.

Jack Donovan (who seems to be a combination of Neal Jordan, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and David Lynch) is a highly successful and acclaimed movie director whose career began with art house movies and progressed to the big screen and the big money. For most of his career, Donovan has worked in California and it was in California, 15 years before, that Ed Loy first met him. They met in a bar and one night Donovan decided to give Loy a part in the movie he was filming. Loy enjoys his 30 seconds of on-screen fame and when Donovan contacts him for help because three extras on his film have disappeared, Loy does his best to find them. The girls where run-aways from different parts of the US and it is only Donovan who notices they are gone and files the missing person reports. Loy has no luck finding them, Donovan's movie is finished, and Loy returns to Ireland.

All these years later, Donovan has returned to make a movie set in Dublin and the two men resume their friendship when Donovan asks Loy to look into some anonymous letters he has been receiving. Loy is willing and starts asking questions, learning that he really doesn't know anything about Jack Donovan at all. Then, Donovan's assistant contacts Ed. An extra on the film has disappeared, and then another, and then Loy decides he needs to put the third girl in hiding. Donovan has developed a style over the years, one in which he focuses on the faces of three minor players and the disappearance of the girls, unavailable now for filming, puts the movie in jeopardy. Donovan and Loy see clearly that this is a repeat of what happened in California and Loy sees clearly, that if the two incidents are connected there are only four suspects. The first is Jack Donovan, the second is Mark Cassidy, the cinematographer, the third is Conor Rowan, the assistant director, and the fourth is Maurice Faye, the producer of all Donovan's films. The Gang of Four are the only people who were at the sites of both disappearances.

Loy doesn't know how the anonymous letters and the disappearances of the girls are connected. Perhaps Kate and Nora did go off to party and will return, apologetically, in their own good time and continue their work on the film. But Loy knows, as he did in California, that these girls are gone.

Hughes intersperses the narrative with the thoughts of the murderer but he doesn't give anything away about the identity until he is ready to let the reader in on the secret. There is less overt brutality in this book but the body count is higher. I think it is the best book of the series.

Shamus Award winner Declan Hughes isn't just any noteworthy crime writer - he's an Irish one and for this reader that makes all the difference. There's a bit of a poet in him, as well as a richly developed descriptive technique. Now, add to this his two decades as a playwright and screenwriter, a background which he brings to the printed page, and you have CITY OF LOST GIRLS.

With this, the fifth in Hughes's Irish private investigator Ed Loy series we find Loy torn between tracking a psychotic murderer who kills young girls, always a trio of them, and the history he shares with film director Jack Donovan. They go back quite a way; as Loy says of their past, "I don't want to talk about it, don't want to think about it. Sooner or later, we would get to it anyway. The past is always out there, a land mine buried and forgotten about, ready to blow the present apart at any moment." And, there are plenty of land mines for Loy to avoid in this story.

As it happens Donovan is now shooting a film in Dublin, and he calls Loy to find the person sending him threatening letters. The task is complicated when two extras in the film, young girls, go missing. There is a third girl, who must be protected. Eventually, Loy finds a similarity between what is happening in Dublin and what happened in Los Angeles some years ago - three young women disappeared from a film that Jack Donovan was making. LAPD never found them and when presumed dead had no clue as to the murderer.

Loy returns to Los Angeles to try to piece together the connection fully aware that a serial killer is still loose, perhaps in Dublin.

Hughes studs CITY OF LOST GIRLS with vignettes regarding Hollywood's beautiful people and film making itself, while at the same time ratcheting up suspense via an eerie voice, an anonymous narrator who is obviously the killer.

- Gail Cooke