Narrative couldn't hold my interest for very long, so I ended up putting it down after 50 pages. Utterly predictable characters, situations, plots, and lurid prose style. Unlike The Deep Blue Good-by, in which MacDonald used a self-conscious "hardboiled" style in order to reflect back upon the genre and the archetype of the sadistic, misogynistic male detective, here MacDonald seems to be using hardboiled cliches for no such purposes: instead, he's just relying on them. As I said, I only got 50 pages into the book before giving up, but the prose was so lifeless and unexciting, and the characters so dull, I practically felt that I could plot out the rest of hte book and come up with something pretty similar.