After some months, word started to get around that we were the people to go to if you needed a hand broken. In this city, that was a lot of hands. You’d be surprised. It was all we ever seemed to do: find people, young men mostly, and then break hands. Dried blood began to clog the metallic lighter I’d place between their middle and ring fingers. We grew bored.

This book does a quite fresh take on the old noir genre. I'm not a person who reads detective stories, but I'm completely sold on Conan Doyle's stuff, and I absolutely dig Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. However, I do like my stories not being stuck in the usual, old, tritely used detective-story style, so this shook things up for me.

This is Alan Trotter's debut novel, and it's strong - to begin with. It goes sideways about two thirds in, but up till then, all is well. There are a lot of nice sentences in the book, like the following:

The sap’s head lolled side to side and his mouth began chewing on vowels and letting them drip off him with the water.

…and:

The cup rang a small sharp note as it hit the table top, and the waitress ran away like she was chased.

This book is filled with noir clichés but in a good way. What is not very nice, is how the author tries too much towards the end of the book; it becomes muddled, sentences grow out of their britches with nowhere to go, so the results are soiled.

I eagerly await the author's second novel.