I had great expectations for this novel, but unfortunately, the quote from which the title is taken is the best part. In the beginning, it's a fully competent mystery with a heroine in the Kinsey Milhone vein. Toward the end of the book, the "heroine" and other characters begin making choices that I would prefer to find implausible, since otherwise they are so utterly amoral and mind-boggling foolish. If you think that murdering the convenience store clerk can be written off as a little personal foible, then this might be just the book for you. Hard-boiled fiction may be tough and gritty, and the solutions may be untidy and incomplete, but generally the detective is "a knight in shabby armor" struggling to maintain the moral balance. If they are not, they don't interest me, at least not as the protagonist in a mystery series.

I hope this isn't a spoiler, but although the murderer meets a sticky end, the accomplices do not. Despite the angry thoughts attributed to Smokey Brandon, the book as a whole seems to shrug off their guilt; certainly they appear to feel little or nothing in the way of remorse or regret, except perhaps for how the incident has inconvenienced them. Indeed, I think that the portrayal of the least guilty party comes across as grudging admiration both from the detective and the author. To be fair, this character would have tried to avert the crime, given the chance, but once it has happened, seems to regard it as a sort of uncontrollable natural disaster for which human beings have a very limited responsibility. I might have more sympathy if the character anguished over personal loyalty and social responsibility, but mostly he seems that it is very tiresome of the police to make such a big deal out of it. The justifying speech is one of the most forceful and eloquent sections in the book, and Brandon is not given a refutation of remotely equal power.

The subplot involving Brandon's friend is one of the dumbest that I have ever encountered. I'm certainly not starry-eyed enough to think that the situation will work.

I presume that Brandon's compassion shines forth in some other novel. ( )

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