The Wrong Kind of Blood by Declan Hughes

Opening line:

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.

All the Dead Voices by Declan Hughes

Page 33:

"The door to my apartment opened onto a hallway that led directly to the small kitchen; the bathroom lay to the left; to the right were the two great rooms with high ceilings that I lived and worked in. My office was to the front; it didn't have a glass door with my name on it, or a rolltop desk, and the whiskey was Irish, and in plain view, not hidden in a filing cabinet, but I had done without an office before, and it had somehow helped to make everyone's problems my problems at a time when I had enough of my own to be going on with; I hoped an office would serve as a kind of clearinghouse for me, impersonal walls within which the dark secrets and thwarted passions of the cases I worked might disperse, or at least be safely caged. Hope springs infernal. There were three big sash windows and a sofa and two armchairs, in case an entire family wanted to hire me, which had happened a few times, with successful but never happy results. There was a pale oak desk and a dark-stained captain's chair that I sat in, the windows behind me; across the desk there was a Lloyd Loom leather chair with a cane back which women liked to sit in; there was one sitting in it now."