One of the most breathtakingly racist novels I've EVER read. No opportunity overlooked to cram in some weird racist stereotype or another, and there's a little homophobia and just the merest dusting of transphobia too. It's like the author believed that "grit" had to include simply the most embarrassing, lazy racist stereotyping or something. (The most charitable take I might have on this is that Crais does sincerely seem to be going for an "everyone is kind of bad and broken and I'm gonna get real 'real' about it, and that means making minorities look bad too" or something, but...ugh. It doesn't land as anything other than the laziest, ugliest, cringiest stereotyping.)

Extra frustrating because the skeleton of the plot is reasonably compelling and when Crais manages to string together a few consecutive non-racist paragraphs he does a fun job of evoking an idea of LA-in-the-90s that I genuinely enjoyed. The nicest thing I'll say is that L.A. Requiem managed to make me very nostalgic for the nineties and stirred in me a desire to read some (more sophisticated/nuanced/better) hardboiled detective fiction. But yeah, oof, I don't even want to leave this in a little free library or donate it somewhere.