Murder on the Dodder by Keith Bruton

I enjoyed The Lemon Man, both book and protagonist, enough to welcome the sequel, despite genuine preference for standalones. The thing with most sequels is that they don’t hold the candle to the original, and this one is no exception to the rule. It isn’t so much the book’s fault, it’s just that the crisp freshness of originality inevitably leaves the building when one takes to serializing. And so, the series tend to rely on the characters themselves, hoping the reader will form a strong enough attachment to sustain them. 
Does Lemon Man himself merit such an attachment? Well … first off, he doesn’t have OCD and the book should not advertise it. That just had to be said. You want to make your character quirky, hit some modern fiction prerequisites for diversity, sure, go for it. But don’t just mention a psychological disorder to check the box with nothing to back it up.
That said, in the first book the protagonist had a baby and a new love interest to juggle, and that was fun. In this one, he only has the love interest (now a more permanent although difunctional situation). Yes, he still wears slippers to ride a bike, which makes no sense to anyone who rides bikes, unless slippers in Ireland are radically different from slippers elsewhere. Quirky, but is that enough?
Since Lemon Man’s main appeal seems to be overcoming the odds, the author just layers on the abuse as heavily as he can. So instead of cushy paid assassin gigs, Lemon Man gets stuck doing random jobs and trying to save his bestie, while navigating a local gang war—the more he gets in, the more he gets beaten up. Violence is visited and revisited upon his person, until he can barely bike, though he preserves, of course, because he now is in the sequel, one that makes it very obvious a third book is planned.
So, the plot didn’t do much for me. The writing is very, very plain. The opposite of literary fiction—commercial fiction, I suppose. Short plan sentences. One after another. It’s all like …This person walked in. They looked like * and wore * and did *.  First person narration gives it a sort of engaging immediacy, so the book mainly coasts on that.
My favorite thing about this was getting a bikeview tour of Dublin. That never gets old. The protagonist names every landmark and describes the city enough to make it into a character of its own, one likely more engaging that the rest put together. 
Overall, a quick, mildly entertaining read. Thanks Brash Books!